Dear Commons Community,

Under threat from the Trump administration, Columbia University agreed to implement a suite of policy changes yesterday, including overhauling its rules for protests and conducting an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies department.

The changes, detailed in a letter sent by interim president, Katrina Armstrong, came one week after the Trump administration ordered the Ivy League school to implement those and other changes in order to continue receiving federal funding, an ultimatum widely criticized in academia as an attack on academic freedom.  As reported by The Associated Press.

In her letter, Armstrong said the university would immediately appoint a senior vice provost to conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of its regional studies programs, “starting immediately with the Middle East.”

Columbia will also bar protests inside academic buildings and the wearing of face masks on campus “for the purposes of concealing one’s identity.” An exception would be made for people wearing them for health reasons.

The Trump administration pulled $400 million in research grants and other federal funding, and had threatened to cut more, over the university’s handling of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The White House has labeled the protests antisemitic, a label rejected by those who participated in the student-led demonstrations.

As a “precondition” for restoring funding, federal officials demanded that the university to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”

They also told the university to ban masks on campus, adopt a new definition of antisemitism, abolish its current process for disciplining students and deliver a plan to ”reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices.”

Columbia said it had agreed to do many of those things, including adopt a definition of antisemitism.

Sad day for American higher education!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

British satirical magazine Private Eye took aim at President Donald Trump’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to broker an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and his adulation of Russian President Vladimir Putin —with its scathing new cover.

The main headline read: “Russia Demands To Keep Captured Territory.”

A photograph below showed Putin declaring in a speech bubble: “Including the White House.”

Trump boasted during the 2024 presidential election campaign that he would end the conflict in Ukraine on his very first day back in the White House.

That didn’t happen.

Since returning to office, Trump has falsely claimed that Ukraine was to blame for being invaded and attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator.”

Private Eye is a long standing bi-weekly satirical publication, written by credible journalists exposing corruption and inept politicians. Its front covers are always poignant. Like this one.

Most poignant!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As expected, President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday that calls for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin the process of shutting down the Department of Education.  As reported by The Huffington Post and other media.

Yesterday afternoon, Trump announced that his administration would “return education back to the states.”

“Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making,” Trump said.

The president said that under the new order, crucial education funding for low-income students and students with disabilities, including Pell Grants and Title I funding, will be redistributed to other agencies and departments.

He praised the work of dozens of Republican governors, state attorneys general and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice, for their advocacy against the federal department. Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist who has crusaded against DEI in education, was also in attendance.

Trump repeatedly trashed the Department of Education on the campaign trail and had promised to abolish it completely.

“The Department of Education is a big con job,” Trump told reporters last month. “I’d like it to be closed immediately.” It’s unclear exactly what will be in the order. While Trump could shutter many of the department’s programs and services, an act of Congress would be required to eliminate it.

The department has been in Republican crosshairs since its creation in 1980, but despite the GOP’s criticism of the agency, the political implications of dissolving it have made calls for its elimination purely rhetorical — until now.

The order Trump signed is the culmination of a yearslong fight by conservative activists and Republican officials who have increasingly sought to use schools as a means for pushing right-wing ideology on children. They have smeared teachers as abusers, censored educators, banned hundreds of books from classrooms, mounted outright takeovers of school boards, and launched an all-out war on transgender kids by barring them from sports and bathrooms that match their gender identities.

McMahon acknowledged at her nomination hearing last month that an act of Congress would be required to axe the department she would soon lead. She hedged on the question of eliminating the agency outright during the hearing, but in documents shared with HuffPost said she “wholeheartedly supports” Trump’s vision for the agency.

But McMahon could reduce the department’s workforce and slash funding to the point where it would be a shell of its former self. A few hours after she was confirmed by the Senate, McMahon sent an email to the department’s staff urging them to join her on the agency’s “final mission.”

“This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students,” McMahon reportedly wrote in the email. “I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete, we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger and with more hope for the future.”

The executive order was preceded by mass firings of thousands of employees. McMahon said the cuts reflect “the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.” The agency said the reduction whittled the staff count down from about 4,100 to approximately 2,183.

Trump also applauded McMahon’s work and signaled that her role could change if Congress approves the department’s elimination.

“Hopefully you won’t be there too long,” Trump said at the order’s signing. “We’re going to find something else for you to do, Linda.”

The Education Department currently supports 26 million low-income students through Title I funding, handles civil rights complaints from students and their families, ensures equal access to school for 7.4 million students with disabilities, and distributes federal financial aid so that low-income students can afford college.

But right-wing culture warriors have promoted the idea that the federal agency is responsible for “indoctrinating” children with left-wing ideology, even though each state sets its own curricula.

Educators and advocates have been sounding the alarm for months about what Trump’s plans for education mean for the nearly 50 million children currently enrolled in U.S. public schools.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the department has one purpose: “to level the playing field and fill opportunity gaps to help every child in America succeed.”

“Trying to abolish it — which, by the way, only Congress can do,” she continued, “sends a message that the president doesn’t care about opportunity for all kids.”

Abolishing the agency “will reverse five decades of progress for students with disabilities,” Katy Neas, the CEO of the Arc of the United States, a nonprofit group that advocates for people with disabilities, said in a statement. “Children with disabilities who do not receive appropriate education services will face greater isolation, unemployment, and poverty. We cannot afford to undo the hard-won gains of the past — we must protect the future of every student, because the strength of our society depends on it.”

McMahon has said that some of the department’s functions, like resources for students with disabilities, would move to other agencies, but experts warn that the loss of technical expertise would still make it difficult for other agencies to run programs previously overseen by the Department of Education.

Congress would need to pass legislation to eliminate fully the Department, but Trump could still stop many of its key functions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump did not hold back when describing the state of the United States in the first Cabinet meeting of his second term.

 As reported by Mediaite, Trump said “the country has gotten bloated, fat and disgusting,”  

Trump was answering a question about the massive cuts in staffing with federal employees.

“I think Elon (Musk) wants to and I think it’s a good idea because, you know, those people, as I said before, they’re on the bubble,” Trump said. ”You got a lot of people that have not responded. So we’re trying to figure out  — Do they exist? Who are they? And it’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired. And if that happened, that’s okay, because that’s what we’re trying to do.”

“This country has gotten bloated, fat, disgusting, and incompetently run,” Trump said. “I think we had the worst president in the history of our country. He just left office. I think he’s a disgrace what he’s done to our country by allowing millions of people to come into our country.

Trump looks in a mirror too much.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mchael J. Hicks, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University, had an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star yesterday entitled, “Trump has no plan to fix the economy – and Americans know it.”   It is a sober piece that portends financial struggle or worse for our economy over the next year or more. Below is his entire commentary.

Tony

————————————————

Recessions are caused by economic shocks that affect either the demand or the supply of goods and services. President Donald Trump’s policy choices target both supply and demand.

This helps explain the rapid reversal of economic growth that has descended upon the United States. Because these effects hit both consumers and producers, changing course will become increasingly difficult.

This risks a very painful type of recession.

Before I explain how this recession might play out, it is useful to address the president’s main assertion that he is trading short-term pain for long-term gain. It is bunk.

Americans know Trump plan has no long-term gain

The range of economic responses, from declining stocks to reduced consumer sentiment and spending, suggests that families and businesses understand there is no long-term gain in Trump’s plan.

If the White House offered a cogent and thoughtful plan to improve the U.S. economy, then stocks would be rising, business investment accelerating and consumer sentiment rising. That would be true, even if there was economic sacrifice involved.

To illustrate this, imagine if the president offered Congress a realistic plan to balance the budget over five years. It would need to include broad tax increases, targeted spending cuts and a major reworking of our entitlement programs.

Such a plan would cause short-term pain to most American families and businesses. But it would also reduce long-term borrowing costs, ensure the survival of Social Security and Medicaid, and again make us a prime location for foreign investors.

That would boost stocks and provide confidence to American investors and consumers.

Nothing remotely like that is under consideration. In fact, the plan passed by the House would be the most inflationary budget in U.S. history. Every business knows this, every member of Congress knows this and even the president’s economic advisers know this.

Market participants ‒ from homebuyers in Houston to artificial intelligence tech investors to mutual fund advisers to people planning new car purchases ‒ are all aware there is no long-run plan for economic gain.

Prices up, interest rates up: Cycle continues until courageous Republicans act

Indeed, the long-term risk to the economy is now stagflation – the combination of deep reductions of supply and demand alongside an inflationary budget. This hamstrings policies that might reduce the pain of a recession in two ways.

First, our federal debt has become so large that fiscal policy – like the $5,000 stimulus floated by Elon Musk – is unlikely to affect demand.

Second, any inflationary spending policies will force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. This will further reduce spending and new business expansion – cutting both demand and supply.

We are in a cycle that will continue until political pressure ends it. Writing that sentence made me chuckle, because that political pressure would have to come from courageous Republicans.

Ironically, the greatest policy impacts on supply and demand tend to surround the purchase of goods, not services. Tariffs are placed primarily on goods, increasing their price and the price of substitute goods. So all automobiles, not just those made in Canada, will see price increases.

The effects will worsen with stagflation, because interest rates will remain high.

Cars and homes will cost more, and borrowing to buy them will be more expensive. We should see households shift their consumption from goods to services. I think this will be big enough to wholly reverse the manufacturing production boom that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Red states face highest risks

The really interesting aspect of this is that red states tend to dominate the production of goods, while blue states are far more service-oriented.

This is also true at the county and city level.

GOP voters are far more likely to work in the trades, construction and manufacturing, while Democratic voters toil in service sectors: health care, education and professional services.

As with most downturns, the economic pain will not be uniformly distributed.

I make this point only to illustrate that Trump’s rapid recession will cause plenty of tears, but they mostly won’t be those sweet, sweet liberal tears that appeal to his MAGA followers.

Unlike Trump, I don’t revel at the economic pain of people with differing political views. I dislike recessions.

Employment shocks, like the one that is just starting, fall most heavily on the least educated workers, such as those who have not been to college or finished high school. Lost jobs mean that hardworking people lose careers, homes and oftentimes must move from the places they love.

Economic shocks to agriculture and manufacturing are more geographically concentrated, so some cities or towns will be heavily affected, while others escape the deepest job losses.

Workers in manufacturing, construction, logistics and agriculture face far greater challenges finding similar employment anywhere. These workers endure much more painful transitions to new occupations. A large share never again finds meaningful work, and their children have poorer economic prospects than those who do not lose jobs.

Over the past few years, economists were widely criticized for insisting that the economy was strong, even with high single-digit inflation. The coming downturn is going to make it starkly clear why economists are far more worried about the long-term economic effects of, say, an 8% unemployment rate than an 8% inflation rate.

We really dislike both coming at the same time – which is where Trump’s policies are pushing us. By Christmas, many Americans are going to be nostalgic for former President Joe Biden’s economy.

Of course, there is some opportunity to prevent much of this. If the president admitted that his tariffs are a mistake, stopped threatening federal spending like the CHIPS Act and made amends with our allies, he could undo much of the damage. If he could corral a bipartisan Congress to pass meaningful spending cuts and tax increases to balance the budget, we would surely experience an improved economic outlook.

I chuckled while writing that paragraph, too. He’d much rather taunt a Canadian leader than save your job. The president inherited a solid economy poised for a soft landing. He chose a recession.  

Dear Commons Community

The U.S. Department of Education’s office of educational technology has been eliminated as part of the federal agency’s massive reduction in force, according to sources familiar with the layoffs and an email notice obtained by Education Week.

The office, also called OET, was tasked with setting a national education technology plan and assisting states and districts in implementing technology in schools. Practically speaking, the OET has helped states and districts navigate whatever new and emerging technology is affecting schools—from cellphones and social media to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity—by providing policy guidance and evidence-based strategies.

The OET staffers are among the hundreds of employees dismissed from the Education Department, after the federal agency announced that it will shrink its workforce to about 2,200 employees by March 21. That’s just over half of its size when President Donald Trump—who has repeatedly pledged to eliminate the 45-year-old agency—took office on Jan. 20.

While the OET was small, consisting of just three career officials and a handful of fellows, proponents of its work said the office had an outsize impact.

“There’s going to be a new technology—it’s inevitable,” said Joseph South, the chief innovation officer for ISTE/ASCD, who was a former OET director during the Obama administration. “States and districts are going to be trying to figure it out, … and there won’t be an entity that’s gathering research on effective pedagogy, best practices, and then responding back to states with guidance.”

Not all states have a dedicated team or person who coordinates ed-tech, he added.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement announcing the overall reduction in force, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the goal was to make the agency more efficient.

After this announcement, several news sources were reporting that Trump intends to sign an executive order eliminating the entire Education Department today!

Tony

Chief Justice John Roberts. Reuters.

Dear Commons Community,

Chief Justice John Roberts decried calls from President Trump and his supporters to impeach judges who have ruled against administration policies, saying that the courts should be left to resolve legal disputes through the traditional system of litigation. As reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said Tuesday in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

To be sure, judicial impeachments have been floated for political purposes before.

In 1970, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R., Mich.), the future president, called for impeaching Justice William O. Douglas, a pugnacious liberal who recently had published a book, “Points of Rebellion,” sympathizing with the era’s radical movements. Last year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) filed impeachment articles against Justice Clarence Thomas, the current court’s most conservative member whose undisclosed acceptance of lavish gifts from wealthy patrons prompted critics to question his ethics.

Impeachment threats against district judges over preliminary orders issued at the outset of litigation are all but unheard of—let alone from the president.

To remove a judge, the House would have to approve articles of impeachment and the Senate, following a trial, would need to convict by a two-thirds vote. While the odds of that are slim, Roberts and other judges have warned that incendiary rhetoric from political leaders can lead to intimidation of judges and even threats to their and their families’ safety.

Trump loves to intimidate because he is such a cowardly bully.

Tony

President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot, Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.  (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)

Dear Commons Community, 

Unredacted documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released yesterday following an order by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.

More than 1,100 files consisting of over 31,000 pages were posted on the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration’s website in the evening. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.

“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.

Trump announced the release Monday while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, saying his administration would be releasing about 80,000 pages.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said.

Researchers had estimated that the number of files still released either in whole or in part was around 3,000 to 3,500. And last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is “an encouraging start.” Complete versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been made public, he said, an estimate of over 1,100 of about 3,500 documents.

“Rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document,” Morely said.

The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification.” But Morley said what was released Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files or any of the recently discovered FBI files.

Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, with countless conspiracy theories spawned.

He was killed Nov. 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.

A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.

Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.

Files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St. Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a U.S. professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB. The memo said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”

The memo added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted “that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.” It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.

Around 500 documents, including tax returns, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement.

Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files continued to be released during President Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.

Sabato said that his team has a “long, long list” of sensitive documents it is looking for that previously had large redactions.

“There must be something really, really sensitive for them to redact a paragraph or a page or multiple pages in a document like that,” he said. “Some of it’s about Cuba, some of it’s about what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Some of the previously released documents have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.

For those of us who were alive in 1963, the subsequent investigation by the Warren Commission never satisfied our curiosity of what actually happened particularly since the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered by Jack Ruby while in police custody.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway increased its holdings in Japan’s five biggest trading houses, according to Japanese regulatory filings published yesterday.  As reported by Fortune.

Berkshire grew its stake in Mitsui to 9.82% from 8.09%, in Mitsubishi to 9.67% from 8.31%, in Marubeni to 9.3% from 8.3%, in Sumitomu to 9.29% from 8.23%, and in Itochu to 8.53% from 7.47%. 

While the additional Japanese investments were disclosed yesterday, the exact timing of the transactions is unclear, though the annual letter in late February telegraphed what was coming.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, Berkshire sold a net $134 billion in equities in 2024, ending the year with a cash pile of $334.2 billion—nearly double from a year ago and more than its shrinking stock portfolio of $272 billion. 

Meanwhile, U.S. stocks began nose-diving in mid-February after President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs; he has since continued rolling out more. So far, he has hit China, Canada, Mexico, steel, and aluminum with higher duties, and reciprocal tariffs are due April 2.

The Nasdaq has tumbled into correction territory, and the S&P 500 also passed the correction threshold last week but soon pared its decline to less than 10% from its peak.

That’s left investors wondering if Buffett will finally make a major purchase of stock or clinch a mega-deal for a company after complaining for years that valuations have been too high.

But analysts told Fortune earlier that a big splash is still unlikely as valuations haven’t gone down far enough, noting that Buffett usually prefers to be patient.

“He has no interest in timing the market’s bottom, nor does he chase short-term rebounds,” Armando Gonzalez, founder of AI-powered research platform Bigdata.com, said. “Instead, he waits for moments when fear drives prices to levels where the risk-reward equation tilts decisively in his favor.”

Warren Buffett knows the economy and foresaw the instability that Trump brought to it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Raphaël Glucksmann, a French politician is making headlines in his country for suggesting that the U.S. is no longer worthy of the Statue of Liberty, that was a gift from France nearly 140 years ago.

As a member of the European Parliament and co-president of a small left-wing party in France, Glucksmann does not claim to speak for all of his compatriots.

But his assertion in a speech this weekend that some Americans “have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants” reflects the broad shockwaves that U.S. President Donald Trump’s seismic shifts in foreign and domestic policy are triggering in France and elsewhere in Europe.

“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said, speaking Sunday to supporters of his Public Place party, who applauded and whistled.

“It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us,” Glucksmann said.

For background, Lady Liberty was initially envisaged as a monumental gesture of French-American friendship to mark the 100th anniversary of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence.

But a war that erupted in 1870 between France and German states led by Prussia diverted the energies of the monument’s designer, French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi.

The gift also took time to be funded, with a decision taken that the French would pay for the statue and Americans would cover the costs of its pedestal.

Transported in 350 pieces from France, the statue was officially unveiled Oct. 28, 1886.

Is France’s government offering asylum to Lady Liberty?

No. French-U.S. relations would have to drop off a cliff before Glucksmann found support from French President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

For the moment, the French president is treading a fine line — trying to work with Trump and temper some of his policy shifts on the one hand but also pushing back hard against some White House decisions, notably Trump’s tariff hikes.

Macron has let his prime minister, François Bayrou, play the role of being a more critical voice. Bayrou tore into the “brutality” that was shown to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his White House visit and suggested that Trump’s administration risked handing victory to Russia when it paused military aid to Ukraine.

Glucksmann’s party has been even more critical, posting accusations on its website that Trump is wielding power in an “authoritarian” manner and is “preparing to deliver Ukraine on a silver platter” to Russia.

In his speech, Glucksmann referenced New York poet Emma Lazarus’ words about the statue, the “mighty woman with a torch” who promised a home for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

“Today, this land is ceasing to be what it was,” Glucksmann said.

Amen!

Tony