Thursday, October 3, 2019
The Lyricism of the Trump
When the lyrical muse sings, the creative pen dances..
Aberjhani, Splendid LiterariumIt is easy, when getting caught up in impeachment talk, crude behavior towards women, assaults on integrity, and other trump behavior, to overlook one useful didacticism that he has provided to the very young in this country. It is the art of addressing parents (or other adults) with whom a child has become very angry. It can be used, as the trump has shown, whether or not the anger is deserved. What is clear is that if a parent (or other adult) has earned the child’s wrath, that wrath can best be given, as the trump has shown, by the ageless tradition of name calling. There is no better tutor in that art than the trump.
Name calling has made great strides. When furious with a parental edict years ago, the worst vitriol this writer could muster was to tell the offending parent that he or she was a skunk. Since the offending parent was active in what was the forerunner to the civil rights movement, the verbal attack was, on occasion, enhanced by the addition of a racial slur before the word “skunk.” The result of these outbursts was the emergence of a soapy washrag applied to the inside of the speaker’s mouth.
Thanks to the leadership in linguistic vitriol provided by the three-year-old-equivalent who occupies the playroom known as the Oval Office, the young have been provided with a whole new lexicon that they can use when offended by parental or other adult edict. Herewith a few examples. Others abound and a good source for them is provided at the end of this column.
A response to an admonition for conduct engaged in by the child that the child thinks the adult has completely misunderstood, is to tell the parent that he or she is “dumb as a rock.” That is especially appropriate if the adult the child is addressing has enjoyed a successful career. An example of its proper usage is given by the trump’s description of Rex Tillerson, the former president of Exxon and, for many months, the Secretary of State in the trump playroom. To explain his dislike of Mr. Tillerson, the trump said Mr. Tillerson was “dumb as a rock.” To emphasize his point the trump said, in another meeting, that Mr. Tillerson was “lazy as hell.” In another closed door meeting the trump told those present that former vice-president, Joe Biden, was also “dumb as a rock” and in a very recent meeting described him as “stone cold crooked.” Any of those pejoratives would be useful for a child retorting to a parent or other adult by whom, the child believes, he or she had been wronged.
Another response to an admonishing adult by an offended child, is to tell the object of the child’s ire, that he or she is “creepy sleepy” and, therefore, the child has no obligation to do as bidden. That comment too, was a trumpian description of Joe Biden.
Telling the parent that he or she is a “slime ball” is another rewarding retort that can be administered by the child. That is how the trump referred to James Comey, who was, among other things, the former director of the FBI.
The child may tell the parent who has offended that he or she is “Wacky and Deranged” for the criticism levelled at the child. That is how the trump referred to Omarosa Marigault Newman, one of his former aides who had fallen out of favor. And, of course, if the child is too young to understand the meaning of “deranged” the word “wacky” can be used by itself as the trump did when describing Frederica Wilson, a member of Congress.
The child being admonished by a parent might respond that the parent is a spy and should be shot, a suggestion made by the trump about the unnamed whistle blower. The child might also, for good measure, say that the observer is crooked for having reported the misconduct by the child since the child is, in that context, denying that the conduct of which the child stands accused, ever occurred.
It is, as noted at the outset, impossible to list all the responses to a parent or other adult the child has learned from the trump,and may wish to use when dealing with an offending adult. For a long, if perhaps not complete list of all the offensive words and expressions that have come from the tweeter-in-chief when referring to those who have fallen from favor, the child who has learned to read or the parent of the very young child, is directed to Wikipedia. That publication has done an excellent job of compiling a list of all the verbal garbage that has been spewed by the playroom’s occupant when not watching television. If the words that have emerged from the trump cess pool commonly referred to as his mouth , prove useful to the very young trying to adequately express their displeasure with an adult, the trump will have left his only useful legacy.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
DeVos Redux
— Vladimir Nabokov, PninLike so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.
They’re back-the folks in the Education Department.
Remember Betsy DeVos? Trump made her Secretary of Education. She had no experience in education but was a big fan and supporter of charter schools in Michigan. Those schools were, by most measures, less successful than their public school counterparts and scored much lower on various comparative measures than schools in other states. Nonetheless, she was very wealthy and that, as we have learned over the years, is all that is required for someone to be invited to play in the trump playground.
Remember Diane Auer Jones? She is a senior adviser to the Department of Education on post-secondary education. She was an early hire by Betsy. Before starting work there she spent five years as a senior vice-president at Career Education Corporation.
Career Education Corporation was a company in the for- profit education world that in early 2019 agreed to forgive $494 million in student debt as a result of an investigation into its practices by 49 State Attorneys General. The Attorneys General concluded that Ms. Jones’ employer had engaged in deceptive tactics in order to recruit students. Among other things, the students were charged for vocational programs that did not have the proper accreditation for students to obtain licenses to work in their fields of study. The forgiven loans were for money owed to the institution. The practices in question had all occurred during the time Ms. Jones was a senior vice president at the company.
Now, Mesdames Jones and DeVos are at it again. On August 30, 2019 , the Education Department announced that it was making it more difficult for students who had been defrauded by for-profit institutions to receive relief from their debts. They were reforming rules known as the “borrower defense to repayment” rules. Those rules had enabled recipients of educational loans to avoid repayment under certain circumstances.
The new rules apply to loans made after July 2020. The loans significantly tighten up the ability of a student to get a loan discharged when, for example, the for-profit institution closes its doors before the student has graduated. Under the Obama era rule there was something called the “automatic closed school discharge.” That rule provided that, if a for-profit school, such as Ms. Auer’s, closed its doors before a student had gotten a degree, the student could apply to have the loan discharged. Under the Obama era rules, there was no time limit on when the student had to apply for debt relief.
Under the DeVos rule the student must apply for relief within three years after the school closing. As Ms. Auer explained: “We believe that within three years, the borrower will know whether or not there has been misrepresentation.” In masking that assertion she is probably drawing on her own experience while working at Career Education Corporation.
Under the Obama rules, the student debt was automatically discharged if the student did not enroll elsewhere within three years. Approximately 20,000 borrowers availed themselves of that provision resulting in the discharge of close to $222 million in student loans. That will no longer be permitted.
The burden of proof on the student seeking loan forgiveness has been increased. A student seeking relief will have to prove that the college made a deceptive statement “with knowledge of its false, misleading or deceptive nature or with reckless disregard for the truth” and that the student relied on the statement in deciding to enroll or stay in the school.
The burden the new rules place on students seeking relief from for-profit schools that scammed them, is offset by the benefit received by the taxpayer. As Ms. Devos said when announcing the new rules, fraud in higher education “will not be tolerated.” But, she went on to explain, the rules include “carefully crafted reforms that hold colleges and universities accountable and treat students and taxpayers fairly.” The “fairness” means that the amount of student debt being forgiven will be reduced by more than $500 million annually. Over the next ten years it is estimated that the taxpayers will save more than $11 billion. The savings to the taxpayers will, of course, rest on the backs of the defrauded students.
Commenting on the new rules, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said: “This rule is another Trump-DeVos giveaway to their for-profit college cronies at the expense of defrauded student borrowers.” Rep. Bobby Scott (D.Va.) said that “the Trump administration is sending an alarming message: Schools can cheat [their] student borrowers and still reap the rewards of federal student aid.”
Betsy DeVos is pleased with the new rule. So is Diane Auer Jones. So is Ms. Jones’ former employer. It is pleased because the new rule makes it less likely that it will be on the hook for paying back students it scammed. Ms. Jones is pleased because her new position enabled her to do a favor for her former employer and other companies in the student loan business she got to know when working in the business. Ms. DeVos is pleased because she could do a favor for taxpayers like herself. It’s a win-win for everyone but the defrauded students.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
The Immigrant
A Report on the Banality of Evil.
— Hannah Arendt
That the comparison can be made is odious-so are the conditions. So is the one imposing them. He is the most odious of all and his stench pervades the country. He wasn’t the first one to implement it when confronted by those he has made helpless. It happened in Hitler’s Germany.
It was not a long description. It read, in part, as follows: “The harsh living conditions, characterized by crowding, absent sanitation and poor personal hygiene led to considerable morbidity, mainly due to infections, disease and famine. . . .Crowding was the rule, and each cot was occupied simultaneously by several patients regardless of their condition. . . .” Medicine in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.”
Just as immigrants in the custody of ICE are denied vaccines, those in the concentration camps were denied vaccines. The importance of the vaccines was shown by the steps that were taken to obtain vaccines by those not in the concentration camps. In a description in the Washington Post of the importance vaccines played in the lives of those not held in German concentration camps where vaccines were not available, Helene Sinnreich, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, explained: “Vaccines emerged as a powerful, if expensive, tool for resistance. Smugglers found ways to bring medicine and even nascent vaccines into the ghetto. . . . For Jews of the ghetto, vaccines were precious protection and symbolized a belief in their own future.”
The trump story is the decision made by trumpistas not to provide vaccines to children and others in their custody. Unlike victims of the Nazi regime, immigrants in the U.S. in the custody of the U.S. Government who were deprived of the vaccines lacked the ability to get them elsewhere.
As of this writing only three children in trump’s custody have died. They might not have died had they been provided the flu vaccine. Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatric professor at Harvard told CNBC that child deaths are rare events. “When I learned that multiple children had died in detention from potentially preventable causes, it truly disturbed me. The country needs urgent answers . . . so that children stop dying in detention.” Alia Sunderji a pediatric emergency physician observes that normally influenza doesn’t pose much of a threat to children. But when children are placed in overcrowded and generally obscene conditions as the trump has done, you have created a “death trap.”
It is not only the children held in detention camps whose health is at risk. In another mark of the compassion the trump and his cronies have for those with medical conditions, on August 6, 2019 the trumpistas brought the Medical Deferred Action Program to an end.
The beneficiaries of the program were those with illnesses that could not be treated in their home countries or whose children could not be treated in their home countries. Under the Medical Deferred Action Program those who have entered the country in need of life saving medical care, for themselves or their children, were permitted to stay for up to two years to receive the needed medical treatment. If the need still existed at the end of the two-year period, their stay could be extended for an additional two years. Immigrants present in the United States under that program were permitted to have employment to support themselves and their families.
The program was administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Effective August 7 the program was taken over by the masters of compassion, ICE, and within a week it brought the program to an end. It began sending letters to all the families who were in the United States because of the need for medical treatment and were here because of the Medical Deferred Action Program.
The letters notified the immigrants that they were no longer welcome and would have to leave the country within 33 days. The letter made no exception for those whose lives depended on being able to receive the kind of treatment only available in the United States. It applied to those who had just arrived and those who had been here for many years. In Boston alone, there are children from 20 families whose lives depend on being able to continue receiving treatment for illnesses such as muscular dystrophy, HIV and other serious illnesses. They have been given 33 days to leave.
As Democratic Senator, Ed Markey said: “This is a new low. Donald Trump is literally deporting kids with cancer.” Anthony Marino, head of immigration legal services at the Irish International Immigrant Center said: “Can anyone imagine the government ordering you to disconnect your child from life saving care. . . knowing that it will cost them their lives?” The answer is, of course, yes, if the person giving the order is trump.