The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

Thing is, we could dismiss Leef as one right winger with a dumb idea, but it's not just Leef's personal individual dumb idea. Let's trace it. He's referencing a piece by David Randall published at Leef's own shop, "It's time to mandate merit." Randall is the executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, and what he is pushing is their model bill, the Faculty Merit Act. Which is a dumb bill.

Who are these people?

The National Association of Scholars is a long-standing right wing outfit that was culture panicking before it was cool. They were founded in 1987 to preserve the "Western intellectual heritage" and "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," originally called Campus Coalition for Democracy. They get funding from all the usuals-- Alliance Defending Freedom, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, Olin, etc etc etc. Founder and long time president was Stephen Balch, who has made a career out of operating in these Let's Make Colleges Not Liberal circles. Current president Peter Wyatt Wood is a regular columnist for National Review.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Reagan adviser, has been in the group, as has Chester Finn. Go figure.

Leef's opening idea-- that a lefty education ideas like multiculturalism, gender studies and affirmative action are 1960s radical notions that caused institutions like universities to become a threat to Western civilization and general white conservatism-- that's a long-standing belief of NAS, periodically updated to include CRT and DEI. NAS has launched a variety of battles to oppose things like the AP History framework and anything DEI-ish and climate change talk. They often worm their way into state level stuff, like back in 2001 when they tried to commandeer Colorado's teacher training system.

In 2022, NAS decided to launch a whole new initiative under the heading of Civics Alliance, an attempt to ride the wave of culture panic into some new controls that included a variety of pre-fab policies for new board members who wanted to make sure that White kids weren't being discriminated against.

Their mission statement manages to squeeze a whole lot of right wing alarm bells into one paragraph:

We oppose all racism and support traditional American pluralism, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. These beliefs are not those of the radical New Civics activists, which espouse identity politics with overlapping ideologies of critical race theory, multiculturalism, and so-called “antiracism.” Unfortunately, these dogmas would ruin our country by destroying our unity, our liberty, and the national culture that sustains them. They have replaced traditional civics, where historical dates and documents are taught, with a New Civics based on the new tribalism of identity politics. Their favored pedagogy is service-learning, alternately called action civics, civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, project-based civics, and global civics. These all replace civics literacy with a form of left-wing activism that adapts techniques from Alinsky-style community organizing for use in the classroom.

Well-meaning folks, they warn, might adopt the new wolves in sheep's clothing, but "Well-intentioned reformers must not collaborate with those promoting an ideology that would destroy America."

Civics Alliance drew a real crowd to sign off on their We Want letter-- folks from the Claremont Institute, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Great Hearts Institute for Education, Heartland Institute, 
The Federalist, Eagle Forum. And plenty of familiar names. Jeremy Tate (Classical Learning Test), Sandra Stotsky, Chris Rufo, Nicole Neily (Parents Defending Education), Katharin Gorka, Max Eden, our old friend Rebecca Friedrichs, and  of course George Leef. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.

What does the proposed bill actually say?

CA appears to have set itself out to be a source of model legislation and policy, so the Faculty Merit Act is just one among many others, like the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act and the Human Nature Act (an anti-LGBTQ bill). 

The introduction of the bill re-asserts that administrator and faculty hiring is rife with political discrimination in hiring, which is itself just a "fig leaf" for discrimination by race and sex. "Faculty merit has declined precipitously as a result." It varies by discipline, of course-- "the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics." 

How are we to turn back this tide of affirmative action mediocrity in hiring for college professors? Clearly, the solution is standardized testing. 

Our model Faculty Merit Act promotes academic transparency by requiring all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department.

Yes, the best way to judge that 30-year old aspiring political science professor is to look at the scores from the test they took when they were 17. This is such a dumb idea, and the creators of this dumb bill almost admit it. 

A standardized test is only a rough proxy for academic merit—especially as the College Board has weakened its tests. Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score. But standardized tests do provide some measure of general intelligence.

Do they? Do they really? Because the SATs offer roughly zero measure of teaching and researching skill. In his article, Randall argues 

a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.

Will they? Because I'm pretty sure that a standardized test score is a terrible proxy for faculty merit. Leef quotes this same section and follows it with "This is a very good idea." No, this is a very dumb idea. But the second part really captures the real intent of the policy, which is to get the public riled up against these slacker liberal professors who, these guys are certain, have terrible test scores. Says the bill language:  

The public also will learn something by comparing the average standardized test score of different departments. If Ethnic Studies professors have standardized test scores two standardized deviations below those of physics professors, then the public will have better means to assess the claims of the professoriate to intellectual capacity that merits public deference.

In other words, we have a list here of departments that we think shouldn't exist, and we feel certain that the professors in these departments tanked their SAT scores back in the day, so if we can publish the proof of their intellectual ineptitude, we could erode the support that would keep us from axing them. Also, and "perhaps most importantly," it would provide statistical information that guys who didn't get that job could use to sue the school. 

The actual list of retired scores included in the bill is the ACT, the Classic Learning Test, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the SAT. Also, the school has to swear they coughed up all the applicable scores or they will be subject to charges of perjury. The language of the bill hits all the particulars of the ideas covered above.

The whole exercise takes me back to the early days of the Big Standardized Test, when reformsters were just so certain that they knew about the Trouble With K-12 Education and that test results would provide the biggest lid-blowing digitized Gotcha ever. NAS/CA are already certain that all those damn squishy liberal non-white hires are a pack of inferiors who need to have their inferiority stripped naked to the world so that public opinion can chase them away from the University. 

That's not a particularly admirable goal, but really, the whole proposal is a just a dumb idea. The notion that an SAT score makes a major statement about someone's merit, especially years and years later is just bizarre. "Well, Dr. Wisdompants, we're sure your PhD work is fine and all, and your work as a graduate teaching assistant is swell, along with these letters of recommendation from you last teaching positions-- that's all well and good, but what we really want to see is your SAT scores." 

Or maybe they're picking up on student conversations. "Yes, Professor Bigbrains runs a good class, and I am learning like crazy in there. The professor really knows the field and really knows how to make it understandable to us. But damn-- have you seen their SAT scores??!!"

The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person. 

Almost the only difference between what you saw on television today and what you saw in 2003 is that Donald Trump didn’t put on a flight suit and land on an aircraft carrier to announce his Venezuelan “mission accomplished.”

Along with a bunch of guys in suits standing stone-faced in front of American flags, every element of the madness that got us involved in the mess that was our misbegotten attempt to take over Iraq was there:

It’s going to pay for itself. Remember that one? The invasion of Iraq won’t cost us a penny because…oil. Trump said the same thing about six times today. “We’ll probably make a little profit,” he bragged. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”

Okaaaaay…

We’re designating various people to run Venezuela. Who is going to be in charge there, now that they don’t have a president? “We’re going to let you know who those people are that would run Venezuela. It’s largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me. We’re going to be running it.”

Somebody should find Paul Bremer, the incompetent dingbat who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority, and ask him how that worked out in Iraq. He was the U.S. Presidential Envoy and Administrator of Iraq after Bush fired the retired general he had first put in the job. Bremer was the genius who disbanded the Iraqi army and outlawed the Baath Party, Saddam Hussein’s regime that ran the country, plunging Iraq into sectarian warfare and the insurgency that turned into what we now call the war in Iraq.

But there won’t be any problems in Venezuela, will there? I mean, all we’re doing is taking their oil. Oh, I almost forgot. It’s a snap of the fingers! We’ve got the greatest military in the world, exactly like we had in 2003!

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.” That sentence, uttered today by Donald Trump, was a carbon copy of what Dick Cheney told the American people before the invasion of Iraq. Cheney also assured us that we would be greeted like conquering heroes because we got rid of a terrible dictator and gave Iraq back to its people. Today, asked if the U.S. military would have a presence in Venezuela, Trump looked momentarily confused and then assured Americans that we would need only enough boots on the ground to protect the oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”

We’re going to put the failing oil infrastructure back together and sell oil all over the world. Yeah, you and how many soldiers did you say you’d need? Iraq was pumping about 1.5 million barrels a day before we invaded in 2003. It took a year to get back to that level, and more years to reach Iraq’s pre-invasion goal of about 2.5 million barrels a day. Trump thinks all he has to do is call some of his oil buddies who had “their oil stolen” back in the 70’s…which he referred to repeatedly as “25 years ago.”

That would be Chevron and Exxon-Mobil and the rest of the guys who told us in 2024 that they were going to “invest” in Trump hoping for the big payoff he tells them they will get today. Oh, I almost forgot. Trump also cancelled all wind projects and ended solar subsidies, another gift to the oil companies. What do you need wind and solar for, when you’ve got Venezuela’s oil?

The operation last night in Venezuela was because “they did very bad things to us.” The “very bad thing” that Iraq did to us was WMD, which Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the rest of them couldn’t find despite the “excellent intelligence” that told them it was there. Trump couldn’t shut up about the “excellent intelligence” that contributed to his big victory last night in Caracas. This is the guy who said he didn’t trust his own intelligence agencies report on Russian influence in the 2016 election; he trusted Putin. Trump sent DOGE into the CIA and NSA and every other place with “intelligence” in its title, so he could fire everyone who wasn’t loyal to him. He has not had an intelligence briefing that we’ve heard of, unless you count what his aides tell him about the course conditions at Trump Doral Golf Club.

The murderers’ row of national security officials couldn’t say enough about the brilliant president who decided it was a good idea to go into a foreign country and depose its leader because of oil. Pete “Pop my jacket buttons with pride” Hegseth emerged with the brownest nose of all at today’s press conference. Trump’s operational “courage, leadership, and resolve are the most powerful combination the world has ever seen,” Hegseth burbled. Remember who was the genius in 2003? George W. Bush. At his first cabinet meeting, Bush’s vice president walked into the room and passed out copies of a map of Iraq that had been divided like a pizza, with the names of American oil companies written in each section. That was in February of 2001. Two years later, oil companies and Halliburton, the oil services company, of which Cheney had been president and CEO from 1995 to 2000, were standing in line in Kuwait to follow U.S. forces into Iraq.

That’s enough, don’t you think? The analogies between Iraq and Venezuela are so many and so complete, they’re stunning, including the fact that in the 1970’s, at the same time Venezuela was nationalizing its oil production, Saddam nationalized the stakes held by oil companies from the U.S. and Great Britain and France.

Alongside the memory of George W. Bush, the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein loomed over Trump at his press conference today. The week after the DOJ announced that it has found another 5.2 million pages of Epstein documents that must be gone through and redacted so Trump’s name doesn’t show up, the same DOJ is very much a factor in the “arrest” of that terrible drug dealer Maduro in Venezuela, so he can be brought back to the United States to “face justice.” How is Trump going to accomplish this? Did they fly Maduro and his wife on a helicopter to a U.S. base in the Caribbean, so they could be put on an Air Force jet and flown to the U.S. to face an arraignment?

No, they stuck them on the amphibious assault ship, the USS Iwo Jima, which as we speak is steaming north to New York Harbor, where with great fanfare, the evil Maduro and his wife will be debarked and face a judge in New York City, where Fox News and every right-wing podcaster on earth will have a front row seat for the whole glorious thing.

We won’t be talking about Epstein next week! We’ll be talking about Nicolas Maduro! At least, that’s what Trump hopes.

Incidentally, Trump was asked by one enterprising reporter why he went to the trouble of a major military operation to arrest the president of one South American country alleged to be a drug lord, when he just pardoned another president of a Central American country who was convicted of the same offense and was serving time in a U.S. prison.

Trump gave the same five letter answer he has for everything. Biden. The former president was very mean to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez. How did he know this? Trump turned slightly and indicated the men standing behind him, who included his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “They told me,” he said.

Trump went on to brag for a few moments on how many wars he had ended, except for the one in Ukraine that he thought would be “the easiest.” He said that right now, he is very unhappy with Vladimir Putin, because he is “killing too many people.” But that war isn’t his fault. It’s not even Putin’s, apparently. Whose fault is it? Biden. Trump said that war would never have happened if the 2020 election hadn’t been stolen from him. Who told him there wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine, you might wonder? Putin.

I have to tell you, I had a cold-flash watching Trump’s press conference. It’s as if the last 20-plus years never happened. Trump and his genius combined forces operation rolled into Caracas just like we rolled into Baghdad, with bombs going off in the dark, explosions visible across an urban landscape…

Shock and awe all over again. Oil all over again. Taking back what was “stolen” from us, all over again.

Blood will be spilled, all over again. But this time, as Trump said, it won’t be “10,000 miles away.” This time, it will be in our backyard, where blood is just as red and bodies are just as dead as they are 10,000 miles away.

A surprise U.S. military strike to arrest Nicolás Maduro has ignited constitutional, geopolitical, and humanitarian concerns — with no clear endgame.

However prepared we should have been for a “large” U.S. military strike inside Venezuela, the overnight news of a widespread attack to cover the arrest and removal of Nicolás Maduro and his wife was stunning.

For all of Donald Trump’s bluster, perhaps equally stunning is the mountain-high pile of questions unearthed by the un-declared war incursion into another country in the name of a “drug enforcement” arrest.

What exactly have we accomplished besides arranging to put the Maduros on trial? What chaos have we now unleashed in a well-executed military strike that has no apparent plan for what happens next?

“We are going to run the country” with selected, unidentified Venezuelan officials until satisfactory leadership can take over, said Trump of the strikes, paid for by a renewed oil industry. Without explanation of how that will work – other than U.S. corporate takeover of oil fields. Trump said a much larger “wave” of attacks was considered. Trump suggested U.S. troops will be kept available in Venezuela or nearby for an undesignated period of time, though he was unclear.

Trump’s press conference explanation of the raid was so wandering that it was difficult to find the specific trigger for the raids. It clearly wasn’t drug smuggling allegations alone, or even “theft” of oil property, or anything about safety of Venezuelans. It was not clear what offenses were against the United States specifically. Trump claimed historical “Monroe Doctrine” needs for American dominance of the hemisphere, the righteousness of deportations and deployment of federal troops against Venezuelan gang members.

Have we once again entered conflict without a definable end goal? Will U.S. troops be committed to peacekeeping made necessary by decapitating the country’s leadership?

Do we really think we have stopped drug traffic to the U.S., or reclaimed U.S. oil interests, or somehow “liberated” Venezuelans from a government we dislike – and not triggered an outflow of Venezuelans to other countries, including our own? Are we really supposed to believe that a police action now comes with a naval armada headed by an aircraft carrier and 15,000 troops offshore? There even are questions about new drug trafficking claims against both Maduros since a 2020 conspiracy indictment listed Maduro but not his wife, though the conspiracy was a group that apparently does not exist.

Is this an end to some Venezuela chapter – or the unleashing of much wider aggression not only by this country, but by others who will see justification in the capture of Maduro as authorization to undertake incursions of their own?

Serious Questions

As an operation, the strike involved bombing multiple military bases and a stealth Delta Force assault on a fortified Maduro home. The city was darkened, there was meticulous coordination with intelligence agencies, the weather cooperated. A helicopter took fire, but there were no fatalities.

There are serious questions about Trump’s own abuse of presidential war powers and the role of a Congress that seems to be flailing to assert itself as anything close to an effective branch of our own government. There are serious questions about a president who ignores polls showing 70 percent or more of voters opposed to more wars starting a new one with reasoning no one can offer persuasively.

Trump simply dismissed criticisms about any needed authority for the strikes. “They should say great job,” he told Fox News. “They shouldn’t say ‘Oh, gee, maybe it’s not constitutional.’” That hardly answers questions that the claim to ”inherent powers” for the president solely to dispatch U.S. military, indeed is constitutional. However loathsome a character as Maduro, whose legitimacy the U.S. disputes, what exactly has Maduro done that merits invasion and capture?

There are serious questions from an attempted takeover of Venezuela, a sovereign nation, by a piqued Trump. Why not China, where fentanyl is said to originate, or Mexico, where it is processed? Why not Colombia, which has been dealing with cartels for decades?

If we care so much about foreign leaders who promote drug sales, why did this very same Trump pardon the former Honduras president who was not only arrested, but convicted and imprisoned in the U.S. for smuggling 400 tons of cocaine into this country?

Peacemaker Trump?

Why was Trump only casually mentioning to Fox News that U.S helicopter was hit? Doing so seems only to underscore that Trump sees the military as a plaything for him to use at will to satisfy some gut instinct rather than to carry out strategic planning.

Why the constant show of force, particularly from a Trump who jealously wants a Nobel Peace Prize and brags about settling various conflicts – that remain contentious? Who is granting Trump the right to run this hemisphere as a personal sandbox?

Indeed, just this week, Trump threatened  Iran over any crackdown on public protests even as Trump seeks to put the U.S. military on our own city streets to stop our own protests about his presidency.

What makes this incursion different from Russia seeking the overthrow of Ukraine?

In place of a congressional declaration of war with an explanation of goals, we have a Trump Social Media post in the middle of the night.  We see after the fact efforts from Secretary of State Mario Rubio — who had said we were not pursuing regime change and now insists that military conflict is over after this set of bombing — with Republican senators and international leaders to calm fears of a wider conflict.  Rubio insisted it was largely a law enforcement issue and a “trigger” situation that precluded congressional notification.

A number of Republican lawmakers who represent districts in Southern Florida with large Venezuelan Americans were celebrating.

Russian and Iranian leaders immediately sided with Venezuela, Columbia put its army on alert for new migrations and called for immediate UN Security Council review, international figures were at least wary if not angered by the actions. Only Argentina’s leader, a Trump ally, was vocal in support. Diplomatic experts were concerned that the move would further embolden China to like acts in Taiwan.

The ripples are not just local to the suddenly uncertain streets of Caracas.

Apart from all else, declaring this act of war an execution of a years-old arrest warrant flies in the face of others, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who face outstanding charges. Those, of course, also had included Trump’s own allegations of law-breaking until his Justice Department forced their dismissal.

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The post Piles of Questions On Maduro Capture In Venezuela appeared first on DCReport.org.

We have become way too accustomed to the idea that the founders of this country did not foresee the damage that could be done by a madman serving as president. Our problem isn’t just the unhinged lunatic whom 77 million of our fellow citizens saw fit to elect in 2024. It’s the whole fucking system.

This country is supposed to be comprised of three essential elements: The Constitution, our set of governing laws, which is written on paper and is kept in Washington D.C., the only piece of land in the United States that is not a state, but the “District of Columbia.”

The second element is the land. The United States started out with the 13 states that had been colonies of the British Empire. The country expanded as land was seized by force from indigenous people whose presence here predated settlers from Europe by thousands of years. It was further expanded by the Louisiana Purchase, which was not a transfer of title to land, much of which was unexplored at the time of its sale, but instead a granting by sale of the right to take lands controlled by indigenous tribes by treaty or conquest by war. The rest of the land we now consider the Continental United States was seized forcibly from Indian peoples or gained by war with Mexico or treaties and purchases from Spain.

The third element is people. I don’t use the term “citizens” here, because the founders did not grant citizenship except to white men. Citizenship had to be gained for slaves by fighting a Civil War with slave-owning states, and by amendments to the Constitution granting citizenship to former slaves and those born within the boundaries of the country and by the 19^th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

Our constitutional republic is failing because the Constitution is failing the other two elements or our country, the land and the people. The Constitution has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, which has imposed limits on citizenship of people by restricting the right to vote. The Congress, another branch, has abdicated its responsibility to provide a check on the other two branches by refusing to write laws limiting the power of either the judiciary or the executive.

This has left the executive – the president – unbound. The Supreme Court quite literally removed one check on the executive – the laws of the land – by granting the president immunity from prosecution for official acts taken as president. The Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, did not immunize the president for private or unofficial conduct, but the Congress has done that already in requiring everyone serving in the government to abide by ethics laws barring conflicts of interest and self-dealing…except for the president.

What sense does it make that no one can engage in corruption and self-enrichment from public service, but the president can? It doesn’t make sense, but self-enrichment by powerful people, beginning with politicians, at the public trough has been baked into our constitutional republic from the beginning.

Take, for example, surveying. Land does not have value unless it can be defined, and boundaries defining pieces of land are determined by surveyors. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, our first and third presidents, were famously surveyors before they were presidents. This gave them enormous power to draw land boundaries that would become political lines of demarcation such as counties and towns and cities. And it enabled both men to favor friends over enemies in the defining of land on the basis of value beyond its worth in a sale and in disputes over boundaries that might involve water resources or agricultural land utility.

When Thomas Jefferson set out to explore the land beyond the Mississippi River that had been purchased from the French, he put his cousin Meriwether Lewis in charge of the expedition, promoting him for that purpose from lieutenant to Captain, and reducing in grade William Clark from captain to lieutenant. He made certain that Lewis was educated in science and navigation, ensuring he was taught the use of a sextant and giving him access to his own library at Monticello that was filled with maps and books on American geography.

Privilege by virtue of wealth and family connections was baked into our constitutional republic from its beginning. I’ll give you a more recent example of manipulation of American land for profit by the men who run our government. When President Eisenhower, working with Senator Albert Gore Sr. from Tennessee, got the Federal Aid Highway Act passed in 1956, surveyors set out to map it. Decisions were made within states about where the highway would go. This involved, in many cases, which farms would be bisected by the road that became Interstate 70 as it ran through, for example, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, just to list four of the ten states it passes through. So farms that were bisected would cost more money to run because the land was divided and farm equipment would have to cross the highway. Farm equipment might have to move miles and miles to reach bridges over the highway, costing money in fuel and wear on equipment, not to mention the farmers’ time. Farms that the highway avoided would be worth more money.

And crucially, everywhere a highway exit was to be established, the land around it would become extremely valuable because of businesses that over time would spring up, such as gas stations, convenience stores, motels, and later, office complexes.

These were political decisions with winners and losers. Anyone with advance knowledge of the route the road would take and the location of interchanges could buy land cheaply that would be worth much more when the road went through and exits to local roads were established.

The corruption we see today with Donald Trump is nothing new. The only change might be that Trump has had to move overseas to ply much of his corrupt self-enrichment because so much of what we have here in this country has already been carved up by powerful men at the expense of the less powerful. A good example of this was the way interstate highways were surveyed to pass through poorer neighborhoods of cities, sparing more wealthy areas. Much later it would become known that highways brought pollution in the form of car and truck exhaust that would affect poorer areas much worse than wealthier ones. And this doesn’t even get into who got the construction contracts, who provided concrete and asphalt, who put up light poles in urban areas and around interchanges…

You get the picture. It’s never been of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s been of the wealthy, by the well connected, and for their friends and children and relatives right from the start.

It was worse in the beginning, as indigenous people were killed and forcibly removed from their land when territories and states were being carved out of wilderness and land was surveyed for government-granted homesteads and sale. This kind of extraordinary corruption continued when, after the Civil War, slaves were not granted land on which to farm and build businesses but were rather sold land by the plantation owners who had owned them.

How about that? You’re a slave, you can’t own anything but the clothes on your back, you aren’t allowed to own land, even freed slaves had difficulty buying land, and freed slaves were not permitted to own land collectively on which to build a church, for example. Groups like the KKK terrorized Black citizens to keep them from voting. They burned Black businesses and Black churches. The Tulsa riots burned to the ground an entire neighborhood of homes and businesses owned by Blacks to terrorize them into submission and control by whites.

This is what our constitutional republic has wrought in our tortured past. Today, what we have is what you might call continuation of the same terror by other means. Supreme Court decisions have reduced the meaning and power of the citizenship of Black Americans by, piece by piece, destroying the Voting Rights Act. The Citizens United decision reduced the power of everyone’s citizenship by allowing corporations to buy and sell not just individual politicians, but an entire political party. One man, Elon Musk, spent $300 million of his own enormous fortune to buy the presidency for a man who in return, granted him the unconstitutional power to formulate a government department, DOGE, without Congressional authority, and conduct unconstitutional raids on government departments and services that bedevil us nearly a year later.

The bought-and-paid-for political party has carried out the commands of its corporate and billionaire masters in other unconstitutional ways. The Republican-controlled Senate denied President Obama his right to appoint a member of the Supreme Court by simply sitting on its constitutional duty to advise and consent for nearly a year until Obama was out of office, then turning around and granting votes on nominees by Trump within a few months.

This is not the way that our system of government is supposed to work. We are seeing not just the flaunting of laws and constitutional norms but their end.

I know what you’re thinking: What can we do in the face of this continual corruption and lawlessness? In the short term, we can refuse to be a part of it. The musicians and actors and dancers who have cancelled their appearances at the Kennedy Center are providing a good example of what it means to refuse. That place clearly means so much to Trump that he went to the trouble of illegally – as if that even means anything – put his name on it. So hit him where it hurts. Don’t let him present a single act or production or event that is of any quality or talent at all.

What can we do? Don’t watch CBS News. The takeover of CBS by the Ellison family and their hand-puppet Bari Weiss will not work if we don’t let it. CBS Evening News is already in third place. Weiss just put what Gary Legum at “Wonkette” called “a jar of mayonnaise” in the anchor chair. Send Weiss and her new jar to the basement.

Do you know what today is? It’s January 2. It’s time to get ready for the midterm elections. With everything the Republicans are doing, and with the evident diminishment of Trump’s power and his physical and mental state, we can win back the House, and we stand a chance to control the Senate.

Our constitutional republic is groaning under the weight of 250 years of unconscionable political and moral mendacity. On July 4, Trump will make as big of a fool of himself as he did with his incredibly misbegotten parade last summer. We can do just the opposite. We can transform the celebration of our country’s 250^th birthday by turning out in all our diversity as the people who made this country what it is today. We don’t own this country like the Republican Party thinks it does, and the Supreme Court wants it to. But we live here. We are citizens. We are proud of being Americans, and we have the ability and the power to show them what that means.

Tomorrow, I will have a few ideas of how we can do this. Until then, chin up and chest out. This is going to be our year.

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By “selective universities,” I mean places like Ivy League schools, along with places like Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the Chicago. Such schools admit only a small fraction of their applicants. However, to reassure both insiders and outsiders that they are open to admitting a broad range of students–whatever their socioeconomic background–these schools also have large numbers of people working departments of admissions to screen and evaluate applicants.

It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the actual effect of departments of admissions is that the student bodies of these institutions end up including more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than would happen if the schools just admitted students purely by SAT scores. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John N. Friedman provide the evidence in “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, published online October 30, 2025, ungated copies available a various places, like here). They write at the start of the essay:

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges. Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. senators, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

From the abstract of the paper, they summarize the results this way (emphasis is mine):

We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admission rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of postcollege success.

In the paper, they write:

We consider a counterfactual admissions scenario in which colleges eliminate the three factors that drive the admis- sions advantage for students from high-income families—legacy preferences, the weight placed on nonacademic ratings, and the differential recruitment of athletes from high-income families—and refill slots with students who have the same distribution of test scores as the current class. Such an admissions policy would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points …

The selective private colleges that are the focus of this study are what economists sometimes call “donative nonprofits,” meaning that they rely on donations (and earnings from an endowment based on those donations) as a major form of income. From a financial point of view, it is unsurprising that a donative nonprofit–with the potential for large future donations in mind–would tend to favor children of alumni or those from the top 1% of the income distribution over other applicants with equivalent test scores. But it’s useful to be clear on what’s happening here: when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores.

The post How Selective Universities Can Increase Socioeconomic Diversity: Admit by SAT Scores first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Just days after DCReport revealed the New York Fed quietly removed caps on emergency lending, the central bank injected another $34 billion into Wall Street—amid rising turmoil in precious metals markets.

On Sunday evening the New York Federal Reserve made another gigantic infusion of cash into one or more Wall Street banks.

On Monday DCReport revealed that after going more than five years with little to no cash infusions from the New York fed, one or more of the big Wall Street banks has been requiring gigantic infusions of cash since Halloween. On the day after Christmas at 8:00 in the morning there was a $17 billion cash infusion, our economics correspondent James S. Henry discovered.

Things have taken a turn for the worse.

On Sunday December 28th at 5 PM, when banks are closed, the New York Fed infused one or more Wall Street banks with $34 billion of cash.

Soon after, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tightened requirements to speculate in silver and gold. The CME, as it’s known to traders, said this was a routine action to make sure the silver and gold markets remain liquid and firm.

The CME said the tightening was in response to volatility in the market for those two precious metals. That announcement went to subscribers to its alerts and was not reported, as best we can tell, in major press reports.

Cash infusions to banks are a standard operating practice. Sometimes banks get short on cash. But from early July of 2020 until Halloween there were virtually no such deals by the New York Fed helping Wall Street banks.

Then, in a scary move, one or more of the banks got $51 billion of cash on Halloween. The cash infusions from Friday and Sunday also equaled that amount. These huge cash infusions come after the New York Fed lifted the caps on how much the banking industry can get in emergency cash infusions.

The NYFed’s poorly worded Dec. 10 announcement went unreported by major news organizations.

At DCReport we think it’s an ominous sign that the NYFed is expecting more and larger cash calls soon. Why else would it make such a policy change?

The New York Fed does not disclose which banks benefit from these cash infusions, but people who follow precious metals markets and other speculative moves have been pointing for weeks to JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank. One of JP Morgan’s units disclosed that it sold about 5,900 tons of silver it does not own in what’s known in the trade as a “short sale.”

Just as you can make money by buying something and holding on to it in the hope the price will rise, speculators can also do the opposite.

If you think the price of a commodity or any other assets are going to fall you can sell it at a high price hoping to buy it back at low price and profit off the price drop. The trading desks at the big banks do this by borrowing shares they don’t own or in some cases making “naked” sales of shares they don’t have at all.

The danger in a short sale is that if the price goes up there’s no limit to how much money you can lose.

Since the beginning of the year the price of silver has roughly tripled. That means those who sold short last year are in a squeeze and face cash calls that must be answered the same day if the price of silver or gold rises.

Christmas week the price rose to more than $84 on one of the metals exchanges and then fell 15% to a less than $72 a troy ounce. On another exchange the price didn’t rise quite as high before it fell 11.5% on the last day of 2025.

The concern here is not that the Fed can, and from time to time does, infuse banks with cash to cover shortfalls. It does this through a mechanism called a Repo in which the bank puts up collateral to cover the cash infusion. The rules include a sophisticated shield from federal Bankruptcy Court filings and with super low interest rates.

The issue is that after five years and three months with virtually no such cash infusions there’s suddenly a spate of them, three of them gigantic.

The Fed in New York has removed limits on the amount of cash it will provide the banking industry, although it is limiting individual banks to between $80 billion and $240 billion per day, depending on how you read its announcement.

Add the fact that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, after reviewing silver and gold market volatility, tightened up on speculation in silver and gold and these are clear early warning signs of trouble.

The last time we saw big cash shortfalls on Wall Street we saw the collapse of the economy in 2008. By some measures the Great Recession was more damaging and more enduring in the harm it caused than the Great Recession that began in 1929.

Families whose head was 35 or younger in 2008 were essentially wiped out financially.  Research by a California business school professor says the effect has been to wipe out the economy – the equivalent of two full years of all the economic activity in the U.S. since 2008. This means America is tens of trillions of dollars behind where it would be but for the misdeeds of Wall Street financiers during the George W. Bush administration, which basically let bankers ignore long established banking practices to minimize risk of systemic failures.

We still haven’t seen a word about this in any major publication that covers Wall Street.

Jim Henry and I know from experience that many of the journalists who cover Wall Street are masterful at developing sources and explaining what they’re told, but unlike DCReport they don’t routinely scour public disclosures, and they don’t have a deep understanding of the law and banking regulations, making them captive to their sources.

We also have yet to hear back from JPMorgan, five of whose spokespeople we reached out to for their side of this story. If and when they do reply, we will give you a full report of their stance.

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The post After ‘Unlimited’ Cash Shift, New York Fed Pumps Another $34B Into Wall Street appeared first on DCReport.org.