Today in measles outbreaks:

Three in Hennepin County, Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Health is investigating three measles cases.

All three patients are toddlers from Hennepin County. State health officials say they haven’t figured out how the children contracted the disease and are trying to track down anyone who may have had contact with them.

Most people who get measles in the United States have contracted the disease while traveling abroad or from someone who has recently traveled overseas. That’s not the case for these children, said Kris Ehresmann, the state health department’s infectious disease director.

They had not been vaccinated.

Most people in Minnesota are vaccinated against measles. But the state health department said immunization rates among some communities have declined in recent years.

Stinchfield said that the current outbreak should serve as a warning to parents who decline to have their children immunized.

“People who have opted out of vaccinating need to catch up and get themselves vaccinated now,” she said.

Stinchfield said the consequences of measles are dire.

“We’ve had children at our hospital even as recently as 2011 who were in our intensive care unit, on a ventilator. It can get into your brain, it can get into your lungs, it can cause permanent brain damage,” she said. “There is no medical reason not to get MMR vaccine unless you have a severe immune deficiency.”

Fifteen in Nova Scotia.

An additional case of measles has been confirmed on the province’s south shore, requiring notification to parents and guardians of students at Hebbville Academy. The current outbreak of measles now has 15 confirmed cases; one other case was identified since last public release on April 4.

“We are currently investigating this particular measles case to determine how it is linked with the other cases of measles we’ve been managing the past few weeks,” said Dr. Ryan Sommers, medical officer of health. “The person in this case, a student, attends Hebbville Academy and we have notified parents/guardians, students and staff at the school.”

Dr. Sommers notes that due to the large number of potential exposures in the school environment, Public Health decided to host a vaccination clinic for students and staff whose vaccination for measles is not up to date.

“This clinic will ideally help us prevent additional cases of measles and ensure that those whose vaccinations weren’t up to date are covered. While we may see other cases due to this exposure, this vaccination clinic along with our investigation should greatly reduce those numbers.”

This is the current outbreak; there was another in January / February, with seven cases.

Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Earlier today, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed a second case of measles in a Michigan adult. The first case was discovered in late March.

The two individuals, who are not members of the same family or otherwise related, were both passengers on the same airline flight when the first individual was contagious, the agency said.

One of the infected individuals dined at two Ann Arbor restaurants on Thursday and Friday of last week…

Maybe all the people who ate there at those times are vaccinated. Maybe.

So we’re playing “Let’s Relive the Cuban Missile Crisis!” these days. I’d so much rather not.

China has warned that “conflict could break out at any moment” as tension over North Korea increases.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said if war occurred there could be no winner.

I wonder if possibly it was a mistake to elect a narcissistic ignorant bully president at this particular moment.

Adding to Chinese unease, President Donald Trump said on Thursday that “the problem of North Korea” would be “taken care of”.

“If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.”

That was a tweet. It wasn’t something he said in a press release or an address to the nation or even at a press conference. It was a tweet. I wonder if possibly it’s not ideal for the president to be threatening wars on Twitter.

In an interview with the Associated Press, North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Han Song Ryol accused the Trump administration of “becoming more vicious and more aggressive” in its policy towards the North.

An institute linked to the North Korean foreign ministry also warned that “thermo-nuclear war may break out any moment”.

Not something for North Korea to look forward to, I would think.

In Livonia, Michigan:

A Michigan doctor has been accused of performing genital cutting on two 7-year-old girls at a medical clinic, in a case that federal officials believe to be the first prosecution under a law banning the brutal practice.

The doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, 44, was arrested on Wednesday on charges that she performed the genital cutting at an unnamed medical clinic in Livonia, Mich.; transported minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; and lied to federal agents.

“Cutting” aka mutilation.

One of the girls told investigators that she thought she and the other girl had gone to the doctor because “our tummies hurt.” The other said the cutting procedure was so painful that she screamed and could barely walk afterward.

Yeah I’ll bet it was painful. 7 years old.

“Dr. Nagarwala is alleged to have performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims,” Kenneth A. Blanco, an acting assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement on Thursday. “The Department of Justice is committed to stopping female genital mutilation in this country, and will use the full power of the law to ensure that no girls suffer such physical and emotional abuse.”

She’s been placed on leave from a medical center named after Henry Ford.

The Michigan case is significant because it can help to raise awareness of an issue that often flies under the radar, said Shelby Quast of Equality Now, an international women’s rights advocacy organization.

She said people who might see evidence of genital cutting, such as teachers and health care providers, are not always aware of obligations to report it. “We need better information about exactly where they are,” Ms. Quast said of practitioners of genital cutting. “We know that this is a child abuse issue, and we know that we need to start training our child protection folks better.”

Slicing children’s genitals off: not ok.

Well that figures.

The new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights once complained that she experienced discrimination because she is white.

As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.

“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”

I don’t see color! All lives matter! Stop talking about racism! By all means talk about racism but don’t obsess over it!

A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.

Ya think?

Jackson takes over an office that has been responsible for protecting students from racial, gender, disability and age discrimination for decades. Under the Obama administration, the office increased its caseload. It emphasized to colleges that they could give preferences to minorities and women to achieve diversity, and advised them to be more aggressive in investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment on campus. Some of the guidance from the office provoked controversy, particularly among Republicans who have long called for the office to be scaled back.

It looks as if now they’ll get what they want.

In another article Jackson penned for the Review during her senior year, entitled “How I Survived Stanford Without Entering the Women’s Center,” she condemned feminism on campus.

“In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”

Sure they do. There is no discrimination, no harassment, no failure to promote, no obstacle of any kind. Perfection has been achieved.

Michael Shermer’s been shedding his light on the world again.

Sure, by all means, talk about it, but don't obsess over it, don't assume everyone is a racist, & don't try to find racism in everything. https://t.co/g2QcyiQBkR

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) April 12, 2017

The “it” in “talk about it” is race and racism. Shermer with his 118 thousand followers says sure by all means talk about race and racism but do it within these limits prescribed by him.

That’s not a good look. It’s not a good look for a prosperous white guy to issue short sharp instructions on how much and in what manner people can talk about racism.

But it gets worse.

No! If you are against racism then stop classifying people by race. If you insist on racial classification don't be surprised when others do https://t.co/qSUIomLLW1

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) April 12, 2017

Right and if you’re against sexism just stop classifying people by sex oh wait

So naturally I did a couple of snotty retweets-with-comments, which automatically showed up on Facebook, which resulted in a tedious argument with someone of the “Shermer has a right to his opinion and you’re an SJW” school of thought. It felt like 2013.

What can I tell you? Shermer has those 118 thousand followers (see above). He’s a Name; he has influence. He’s also shallow, and pugnacious, and not as clever as he thinks he is. For all those reasons I think it’s ok for us underlings to annotate his tweets now and then. But the “You SJW” guy on Facebook thinks I’m wrong and harmful for doing so. “Great way to build a movement,” he told me. Say what? I’m not trying to build a movement. A movement of what? Libertarians? No thank you, we already have plenty of those.

So they can just say anything, and then say its opposite a few months later, and not be held to account – even when the “anything” in question involves existential threats to the polity and the country.

In his first speech as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, the former Republican congressman who once applauded disclosures by WikiLeaks, attacked the group on Thursday as a stateless hostile intelligence unit eager to do the bidding of Russia and other American adversaries.

“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Mr. Pompeo said. To support his assessment, he cited how the group had encouraged followers to join the C.I.A. and steal secrets, and how “it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from antidemocratic countries.”

But Mr. Pompeo’s harshest words were reserved for Julian Assange, calling the WikiLeaks founder a “narcissist” and “a fraud — a coward hiding behind a screen.”

And yet Pompeo was saying quite different things a few months ago.

Mr. Pompeo, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent research group, appeared to have no compunction during the campaign about pointing people toward emails stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks.

“Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks,” he wrote in a Twitter post in July that included a link to a conservative blog. The emails to which the post referred showed that Democratic Party officials favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary.

But hey, they won the election, so now they can drop the lies.

In deploring leakers, Mr. Pompeo opened his remarks on Thursday with an anecdote about Phillip Agee, the former C.I.A. officer who turned against the agency and spent years exposing undercover American spies overseas. He died in Havana in 2008.

Like Mr. Agee, leakers “choose to see themselves in a romantic light,” Mr. Pompeo said. “They cling to this fiction, even though their disclosures often inflict irreparable harm.”

He then turned to WikiLeaks, citing its release of Democratic Party emails stolen by Russian hackers — the same stolen emails he was promoting in July — as evidence of its hostile intent.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he said.

It’s time now…but it wasn’t last July? Last July it was just fine to let Wikileaks and Russia break the knees of the Democrats?

The intel people at the talk didn’t press him on this question.

Mr. Pompeo also escaped any direct questions about how he was managing to heal the rift between the C.I.A. and Mr. Trump, who during the presidential transition compared American intelligence agencies to Nazis.

Asked about his own relationship with the president, Mr. Pompeo said, “it’s fantastic,” adding that he personally delivered Mr. Trump’s intelligence briefing on most days.

Which wouldn’t be the case if it weren’t for Wikileaks and Russia.

The death of Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam is desperately sad news.

She called her chambers on Tuesday to say she wasn’t coming in. The next day she was found in the Hudson, with no signs of trauma.

The unexpected death was shocking and saddening and even set off some suspicions among Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues, many of whom said she had given no indication that anyone — including herself — would want to do her harm.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter in 2012, her mother committed suicide at age 92, according to two law enforcement officials. Two years later, around the same holiday, her brother shot himself to death, the officials said.

She s0unds like someone we can’t afford to lose.

Since 2013, Judge Abdus-Salaam had been one of seven judges on the high court. Before that, she served for about four years with the First Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, and for 15 years as a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan. She was previously a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office.

Judge Abdus-Salaam was known for her steadfast liberal voice, regularly siding with immigrants, the poor, and people with mental illnesses against established interests. She also leaned toward injured parties who brought claims of fraud or misconduct against wealthy corporations.

She was admired by her colleagues for her thoughtfulness, candor and finely crafted writing style. And she was not one to use her decisions as a soapbox even when they set precedents.

…

After law school, Judge Abdus-Salaam became a public defender in Brooklyn and then served as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau of the state attorney general’s office. In one of her first cases, she won an anti-discrimination suit for more than 30 female New York City bus drivers who had been denied promotions.

Last summer, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote an important decision, in the Matter of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C., that expanded the definition of what it means to be a parent. For 25 years, the court had held that the nonbiological parent in a same-sex couple had no standing to seek custody or visitation rights after a breakup.

But that, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote, had become “unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships.” In a tightly reasoned decision, she wrote that nonbiological parents did have standing to seek custody if they showed “by clear and convincing evidence that all parties agreed to conceive a child and to raise the child together.”

In an interview in 2014 about black history, Judge Abdus-Salaam said that she had become interested in her family’s history as a young girl in public school and that her research had led her to discover that her great-grandfather was a slave in Virginia.

“All the way from Arrington, Va., where my family was the property of someone else, to my sitting on the highest court of the State of New York is amazing and huge,” she said. “It tells you and me what it is to know who we are and what we can do.”

So, damn.

God the BBC can be infuriating. In its reporting on the murder by torture of Mashal Khan for instance.

A university student in Pakistan accused of blasphemy against Islam has been killed by a mob of fellow students on campus, police say.

Many students have been arrested after the brutal attack in the northern city of Mardan, and the campus has been closed.

Reports suggest that two young men were accused of posting offensive content on Facebook. One survived with injuries.

It’s not for the BBC to call the content of Khan’s posts “offensive.” It’s not for the BBC to agree with the idea that skepticism or mockery of religion is “offensive” – especially not hours after someone was violently battered to death over such accusations.

Blasphemy is a highly sensitive and incendiary issue in Pakistan.

Critics say blasphemy laws, which allow the death penalty in some cases, are often misused to oppress minorities.

Critics say that, but others might disagree. And what do they mean “misused” – how could laws against blasphemy be properly used?

Last month Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif voiced his support for a wide-ranging crackdown on blasphemous content on social media.

In a statement on his party’s official Twitter account, he described blasphemy as an “unpardonable offence”.

An official at Abdul Wali Khan University who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mr Khan was disliked by other students for his liberal and secular views.

At least 65 people have been murdered in Pakistan after being accused of blasphemy since 1990, a recent think tank report said.

And it serves them right for being so “offensive”?

Ari Berman in The Nation:

My grandmother Sylvia moved from Brooklyn to Iowa when she was 89 years old. It was a culture shock, to say the least. When my mom took her to vote, she complained of the candidates, “There isn’t anybody who’s Jewish!”

I thought of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005 at 99, when the Iowa Legislature passed a strict voter-ID law today. She didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove (she’d frequently walk two miles from her apartment to the grocery store). Her passport expired long ago. She never had a US birth certificate because she was born in Poland and fled the Holocaust. She used her Medicare card as identification. She didn’t possess any of the forms of government-issued photo identification that Iowa will soon require to vote.

The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters—260,000 people—don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill. My grandmother, if she were still alive today, would have been one of them.

But maybe they have to because Iowa is full of people who vote eight times using aliases? Nope.

There were only 10 alleged cases of fraud out of 1.6 million votes cast in 2016 and no cases of voter impersonation that a voter-ID law might’ve stopped. The only conviction was a Trump supporter who voted twice because she thought the election was rigged and her first vote wouldn’t count.

But Iowa Republicans are justifying the move by saying there’s a perception that there’s a lot of voter fraud. That’s super fascinating, because where does the perception come from? Republicans who keep shouting about it!

The fact that Republicans are pointing to the mere “perception” of fraud as a reason to disenfranchise thousands of voters shows why Trump’s baseless assertions that millions are voting illegally is so damaging.

There will be more of these.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

The US military has dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on an Islamic State group tunnel complex in Afghanistan, the Pentagon says.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), known as “the mother of all bombs”, was first tested in 2003, but had not been used before.

The Pentagon said it was dropped from a US aircraft in Nangarhar province.

The news came hours after the Pentagon admitted an air strike in Syria mistakenly killed 18 rebels.

…

The 21,600lb (9,800kg) bomb was dropped in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said. It is more than 9m (30 feet) in length.

“We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters use to move around freely, making it easier for them to target US military advisers and Afghan forces in the area,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, using another name for IS.

Headlines say the stock market has fallen.

Terry Gross did an interview about for-profit colleges a couple of weeks ago that I kept meaning to blog if only Trump would shut up for one second. Her guest was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who has written a book about them called Lower Ed.

She worked as an enrollment officer for two for-profits at opposite ends of the spectrum – a cosmetology career school and a large college that offered associate’s, bachelor’s and graduate degrees. She left after fearing that instead of helping the students she recruited to improve their financial future, she was leaving them with large student loan debt they’d never earn enough to repay.

When she left the for-profit college sector, she returned to college, completed her B.A. and went on to earn her Ph.D. from Emory University. Her dissertation was a study of for-profit colleges. Cottom is now an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

When she worked for them she didn’t realize right away how exploitative they are.

While for-profit colleges have existed for a long time, we have not always had corporate for-profit colleges. Now for-profit colleges, starting around the mid-1990s, are no longer owned by, like, mom and pop local chains. Increasingly, they were owned by shareholder corporations, so they had become a financial vehicle. Because they are a financial vehicle, the way they operate and their relationship to profit and education had shifted.

It’s no longer a matter of “make a basic profit by providing a good service” but one of “make an ever-increasing profit because that’s what shareholders demand.”

They’re thriving in the current economy because jobs keep demanding new skills and credentials.

GROSS: So you’re suggesting that in the world we live in now, in a lot of professions, you have to keep going back and get further training or further accreditation and that it’s often the for-profit colleges that provide that.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: That’s right. For-profit colleges, in many ways, are providing the job training that employers once did but no longer do.

GROSS: So you’re suggesting now that you used to be able to get that on the job, but now you have to pay for it.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Correct.

Which is probably not so bad if the job pays well enough, but if it doesn’t…it is so bad. The for-profit ones tend to be expensive.

GROSS: So this creates a situation where it’s typically people who don’t have a large income, often people who are people of color, single-working parents who end up in these schools, but they cost a lot of money. So you have people, you know, without a lot of income paying really large fees for tuition. So what kind of situation does that create?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: The situation that that creates is that because of how we finance higher education in this country because we rely so much on student loans – that are what we call means-tested, meaning you can qualify for more money the less money you have. Well, we designed it that way so that those with the least amount of resources could increase their educational choices and options because they could borrow more.

Well, the problem in the for-profit college sector is that means that the poor students can borrow the most. Well, that creates an incentive for for-profit colleges to recruit students who will qualify for the maximum amount of student aid. Well, those happen to be the poorest among us, and because of how our society is set up, the poorest among us tend to be women and people of color. So the indirect effect of this is that women, especially women of color, are the most vulnerable to the incentives that have been set in place for revenue and profit-taking among for-profit colleges.

Tragic, isn’t it. Poverty=you can borrow a lot to get training / a credential – but borrowing a lot costs a lot, and costing a lot is especially hard on poor people. Not surprisingly, a lot of people drop out and are stuck with this terrible debt.

GROSS: So these college are supposed to be the education that offers people a path to a better job, a better life, a higher status.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Right.

GROSS: But if you end up having to default on a loan or if you end up being, you know, in debt because of a loan, what happens?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Your options for education are pretty much foreclosed upon. Debt has made our choice of higher education options far riskier than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And in the for-profit college sector, that’s especially acute because those students are more likely to be poor or low income or sort of dancing along the line of poverty, as I say it. Right? Even if they’re not poor at the moment, they have a lot of risk factors for dropping below the poverty line.

Because of that, for-profit colleges really aren’t set up to transform these students’ lives in the way that we think higher education is supposed to do. And so for me, the consequence of that is this system that we’ve come to rely on to increase access to higher education to the most vulnerable among us really only compounds their poverty and their risk factors. Well, that’s the exact opposite of what higher education is supposed to do.

And DeVos is undoing the regulations that were an attempt to mitigate that awful situation.

In a further irony, the for-profit system depends on the Federal Student Aid program.

GROSS: Do most of the student loans that are taken out for for-profit colleges come from the government? Are they government loans?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yes, 97 percent of the students who attend a for-profit college rely on the student financial aid system.

GROSS: So does that mean that the for-profit colleges are very reliant on government loans?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Almost entirely reliant on the student aid system. We don’t have a for-profit college sector were it not for the Federal Student Aid system and the fact that they have access to it. Almost all of their profits – so whenever you hear one of these staggering statistics about how much profit some place like the University of Phoenix has made in any given year, just assume that the majority of that has come from Federal Student Aid dollars, and you will almost always be right.

Tax dollars to enrich shareholders in for profit colleges while trapping poor people in debt. Awesome.

Was Trump “University” one of these scams?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: No, no, no. In many ways, Trump University is even more cynical (laughter) than the for-profit colleges that I talk about and write about. And this is what I mean by that. Trump University didn’t even pretend to set up an actual school. What Trump University really did was it traded on the public’s faith in the word university and used the word university as part of its brand.

But there was no campus, for example. They never pursued any license to actually operate as a school. One of the best ways, actually, to think about Trump University is that it was a lot like a timeshare sales organization than it was an actual school. But what I think that Trump University does tell us about this administration is sort of how cynical they are about higher education. It tells us something, I think, about their position on public higher education. I think that they have signaled pretty strongly that they are not interested in defending public higher education as important to democracy and the public good. And I think this president’s experience with sort of using the word university, trading so cynically on the public’s faith in the word university – kind of gives us an indication of how he views higher education.

Along with his utter contempt for the very concept of knowledge, which is particularly evident in his way of regularly saying he knows more about X than anyone else, when he very obviously knows nothing at all about X.

There’s a very sad (and enlightening) bit about why the for-profit colleges mostly can’t do what they claim to do.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: It’s different because what we rely on for that to work. So if we just think about when we apply for a job for those of us who’ve attended college, how rare it is when we apply to – for a job for them to actually sit us down to demonstrate that we know the skills that we say we know. What we rely on instead usually in that process is for someone on the other side, usually the hiring manager, to look and say, oh, this person has a good degree from a good school. And we trusted that means this person is generally knowledgeable and can be trained in the specifics of this job.

Well, all of those assumptions, those good faith assumptions about our degree have not been proven to be true of the degrees that students were earning from a place like the technical college. The question was is the labor market, are hiring managers looking at the Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the for-profit technical college with the same good faith that they are extending to traditional degrees? And what we have found – the numbers don’t bear out that they are.

Well, if that’s the case, then the students who are assuming that they are getting a degree that will operate just like any other degree really aren’t, and the schools because they are not – they don’t have any incentive to tell the students differently – are not encouraging the students to know about that difference when they choose to enroll in a place like the technical college.

It’s a bit crushing. The hiring manager is never going to “look and say, oh, this person has a good degree from a good school. And we trust that means this person is generally knowledgeable and can be trained in the specifics of this job.” For that step you need a good school, and the for-profit ones aren’t that.

One thing the interview didn’t get into, that I would like to know something about, is why people don’t just bypass the for-profit schools in favor of community college. The answer is probably marketing, but I’d like to know more.

I saw this tweet from Elizabeth Warren

In the choice between students & student loan companies, Betsy DeVos made clear she stands with companies that cheat & squeeze borrowers.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 12, 2017

so I went to the Google to find news coverage. The Times has an editorial.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is inexplicably backing away from rules that are meant to prevent federal student loan borrowers from being fleeced by companies the government pays to collect the loans and to guide people through the repayment process.

On Tuesday, she withdrew a sound Obama administration policy that required the Education Department to take into account the past conduct of loan servicing companies before awarding them lucrative contracts — and to include consumer protections in those contracts as well.

These companies aren’t the loan companies, they’re the collecting agencies – one of those carbuncles of capitalism that are such nice little earners for people whose only talent is carbuncling.

The department is doing the loan industry’s bidding at a time when student debt has crippled a generation financially and the country’s largest loan servicing company, Navient, is facing several lawsuits accusing it of putting its own interest before that of the borrowers it is supposed to help.

A suit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims that Navient saved itself money by steering borrowers into costly repayment strategies that added billions in interest to their balances.

See there? That’s carbuncling. The goal of the federal student loan program should not be to make repayment more expensive in order to enrich the “loan servicing” companies.

And, the Times goes on, it’s even worse in the case of Sallie Mae.

The Illinois and Washington attorneys general argue that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, saddling people with private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them. The two attorneys general — part of an investigative coalition of 29 states — argue that borrowers deserve to have these tainted private loans forgiven.

Oh um – private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them – that sounds so familiar. What does that remind me of, hmmmmmm…

The scenario outlined in the court documents bears a frightening resemblance to the subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago — when mortgage companies caused millions of borrowers to lose their homes by steering them into risky, high-cost mortgages they could never hope to repay.

Poor people. People with less money than rich people and middling people. They get the high interest loans because of the risk factor, so they get fucked over when it all goes smash. Apparently this is what we do here – we look for ways to make poor people pay extra for being poor, and then we gaze very hard in another direction when the poor people are left penniless and in debt and with nowhere to live.

The Illinois and Washington lawsuits argue that Sallie Mae used subprime private loans to build relationships with exploitative schools that then helped the company make more federal loans to their students. Those loans were the jackpot for the company, the lawsuit argues, because they were guaranteed by the government, which steps in to reimburse the lender when a borrower defaults.

This is what profit-making “universities” do – it’s what they’re for. They provide basic vocational training at inflated prices to students who take out federal loans…and then end up ruined when they can’t pay the loans back. It’s a systematic con game, and it’s disgusting.

And DeVos is undoing Obama administration efforts to rein all that in. More power to the carbuncles!

Eric Alterman in The Nation on “thought leaders” via a new book by Daniel Drezner. He says Drezner doesn’t pay enough attention to “the power of money to corrupt and control literally everything with which it comes into contact—most particularly intellectual culture.”

Drezner by no means ignores the issue. Early on, he makes a crucial distinction between old-fashioned “public intellectuals” and the now-trendy “thought leaders.” The latter model is one that sells itself less to an identifiable “public”—something that has become increasingly difficult to define in a society continually segmenting itself according to ever-more-narrow criteria—than to plutocratic patrons…

Today, our most famous purveyors of ideas sell themselves to the wealthy much like the courtiers of the Middle Ages. Drezner notes that these ideas are therefore shaped by the “aversion” that plutocrats share toward addressing the problems we face. Inequality? Global warming? Populist nihilism? An explosion of global refugees? From a Silicon Valley perspective, Drezner notes, such things are not a failure of our system but rather “a piece of faulty code that need[s] to be hacked.” Examining data from a survey of Silicon Valley corporate founders, Drezner notes their shared belief that “there’s no inherent conflict between major groups in society (workers vs. corporations, citizens vs. government, or America vs. other nations).”

“Intellectuals who wish to cater to this crowd will find it difficult to contradict the narrative of meritocratic achievement,” Drezner explains. His discussion of the function of the TED phenomenon is especially cogent: “TED talks are designed for thought leaders to appeal to plutocrats.”

These are the progressives, Alterman emphasizes.

That money demands compromises from culture is not exactly breaking news. But its effect on progressive politics has been devastating, and here, Drezner’s account fails to do the problem full justice. The labor movement long ago lost the ability to compete with corporate America and individual billionaires for the funds needed to make ideas meaningful in the real world, so liberals and progressives must now drink from the wells of wealth.

He quotes a passage from Obama’s book about being drawn into that web – nice, progressive, thoughtful people, but rich and with views that rich people do tend to have.

After spending so much time with donors, Obama admitted, he found himself “avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations…. [A]s a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.”

That’s what happened to both Clintons, except that they embraced it more enthusiastically than Obama did.

The primary talent demonstrated by the “thought leaders” who rise to the top of this stew—people like Thomas Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and the heavyweight champion, according to Drezner’s own poll (in which I participated), Henry Kissinger—is to somehow flatter great wealth even as they pretend to challenge it. Should they pull it off, they get to feel good about themselves as enormously well-remunerated and highly respected public servants. The truth, however, is that by comforting the comfortable, they end up further afflicting the afflicted. It’s no wonder that not only Donald Trump but the entire Republican Party and its supporters now feel that they can ignore the arguments of this class. It was they who built this city: this city of ruin.

He’s not wrong.