The people who benefit most from Harvard’s admissions policies

A federal judge ruled this week that the admissions policy of Harvard University is constitutional.

In a closely watched lawsuit that had raised fears about the future of affirmative action, a group called Students for Fair Admissions accused the Ivy League college of deliberately — and illegally — holding down the number of Asian Americans accepted in order to preserve a certain racial balance on campus.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, however, ruled that Harvard’s admissions process is “not perfect” but passes constitutional muster. She said there is “no evidence of any racial animus whatsoever” and no evidence that any admission decision was “negatively affected by Asian American identity.”

“Race conscious admissions will always penalize to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process,” Burroughs wrote, “but this is justified by the compelling interest in diversity and all the benefits that flow from a diverse college population.”

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The callousness and cruelty of Donald Trump

It is a telling sign of politics in the US that what triggered impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump was his phone call to the Ukrainian president that sought a quid pro quo, asking them to get dirt of the son of his Democratic political opponent Joe Biden in return for releasing weapons that he had held up. In the US what gets serious attention is not major crimes but when one faction of the ruling political establishment sees a chance to discredit the other faction or engages in dirty tricks against the other faction. Recall that impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon were triggered by his operatives breaking in to the offices of the Democratic party headquarters. And impeachment against Bill Clinton was ostensibly because he lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky but we know that the real reason is because Republicans saw a chance to turn a sexual liaison into a political weapon. None of them were impeached for the many awful things they committed because these were in the service of the bipartisan war machine.
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How Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All plan works

Bernie Sanders has had to have surgery to install two stents for a blocked artery. This is a pretty routine procedure now but needing medical treatment of any kind is not good for a candidate about whom questions have been raised about age.

In this clip, he cuts through all the distortions about his Medicare For All plan and lays out for Stephen Colbert how it will work.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Warren is making all the right enemies. After Wall Street executives warned the Democratic party that they would abandon he party if she ended up being the nominee, now Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that he “will go the mat” to prevent her plan to break up the big tech companies because they have too much power.

The pathetic Trump defenders

Trevor Noah looks at those who are trying to defend Donald Trump on the impeachment inquiry.

House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy was particular inept in his 60 Minutes interview. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez points out, people like him get much less scrutiny than she does when does similar interviews.

How to struggle on $350,000 a year

For most people, earning $350,000 per year would be considered an unattainable dream that would promise a life free of financial stress. But believe it or not, this article describes how one family of four finds it hard to manage. Here’s their budget breakdown.

It is true that housing costs in the major coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. are very high. Good quality childcare is also very expensive. But the things that jumped out at me for this ‘struggling to make ends meet’ family was the $70 per day for food, the $400 per month for clothes, the $500 per month for entertainment, the $7,800 per year for three vacations (though they ‘sacrificed’ by spending one week of vacation at home), and the fact that they think owning a Toyota Highlander instead of a Range Rover is being frugal.

Twitter of course had a field day, with sardonic commentary here and here.

Health insurance as a weapon to control workers

The cost of health insurance in the US has been steadily rising. Since most people get their health insurance through their workplace, employers have been passing on much of the increased costs to the employees in the form of high-deductible policies but it still represents a big cost for businesses. For a long time, I wondered why big business were not the biggest supporters of government-run, single-payer health care systems like Medicare For All since that would shed them of one of their biggest costs as well as rid them of all the cumbersome paperwork that accompanies it. You would think that this would be a good thing for them. So why were they not the biggest supporters? I had put it down to their ideological dislike of anything that smacks of socialism.
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We are living in a state of institutional dementia

That is what Kevin Baker argues in the September 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine. He says that it explains why we seem to live in a state of permanent murkiness where abuses happen but are never investigated or if investigated are never resolved or if resolved the findings are buried, one after another, until we get numb and inert. He reviews how little we still know about the major deceptions carried out by the US government in the 55 years that have elapsed since the Gulf of Tonkin.
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With friends like these …

There is no question that affordable universal health care coverage is an idea that has caught on as the awfulness of the current system becomes increasingly apparent, and almost all the Democratic candidates have signed on to it. The most comprehensive plan, and in my view the simplest one to understand and implement, is the Medicare for All plan proposed back in the 2016 campaign by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by most progressives. So where does this leave those ‘centrist’ and ‘moderate’ Democrats (those being euphemisms for Democratic politicians like Joe Biden whose have strong allegiances to the business and financial world) who do not wish to alienate the health insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital lobbies whose profits feel threatened by this proposal? These groups come under the labels of Third Way and the Center for American Progress and are favored by the Democratic party establishment.
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New film satirizes FBI counter-terrorism stings

Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the attacks of 9/11 have been good for the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the entire counter-terrorism industry in the US that have used them to get increased funding and powers. In order to keep those dollars flowing, the FBI has had to repeatedly show success in fighting terrorism and one of the means of doing that is setting up sting operations. If they cannot find real threats, they will create ones.

Trevor Aronson writes about a new satirical film The Day Shall Come based on many of the real-life sting operations conducted by the FBI that recruits hapless people with absurd ideas and then coaxes them to take part in ridiculous plots that are then grandly ‘exposed’ by the agency.
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