Quacking the Code: This week in Paul Krugman's lies. Vol. 1

Douglas Becker, here at a Clinton Global Initiative event,
is the founder of Laureate International Universities, a private
college that hired former Pres. Bill Clinton for $16-18 million
for a symbolic position as "chancellor". Washington Post
Trump University was a classic example of a get-rich-quick
real estate guru seminar that rightfully is blamed for defrauding
consumers. Mother Jones
Pay attention readers, this is what SELECTIVE JUDGMENT is: Condemning the deeds of one person while validating them when someone else is committing them. Paul Krugman, the leading Quackonomist in Hillary Clinton's media priesthood, condemned Trump today for (among everything else) an apparent case of bribery during the Trump University legal battle. Up to here he is fine, because in truth Trump U and other private for-profit universities have made a mockery of higher education. Just last week ITT Tech was shut down after it could no longer collect money from student loan payouts.

But does Krugman mention Clinton's Laureate International Universities involvement? Bill Clinton earned between $16 and 18 million for being that institution's CHANCELLOR from 2010-2015, meaning during his wife's time as Secretary of State. University chancellors are typically ceremonial figure heads that actually have few functions in a college's administration. So essentially that university gave Clinton a check for a job that has no responsibilities. Here are some questions that maybe should have been posed to Chancellor Clinton while he was in that position:
  • Does he have any knowledge of why Chile's accreditation bodies removed LIU's certification in January 2014, during his tenure?
  • How does he explain his participation in what in effect is a debt-leveraging corporation as explained by CNBC just last year.
  • How can they stand behind their position on student debt for low-value degrees given Laureate was compared in the same CNBC article to Corinthinan College and Apollo Education, two competitors roundly condemned for the same practices.

Good for the goose?

Trump's organization was, let's not sugarcoat it, a worthless, fraudulent, waste of money for customers. Yet it never claimed or aspired to accreditation and was basically a series of superficial seminars. So yes it was dirty, but the layers were very thin on this "university". There's no reason to defend Trump University, unless you're a member of the Trump Organization, pure and simple.

Unlike Trump U, Laureate International appears to operate on an even more sophisticated for-profit level that is much more consistent with ITT Tech, DeVry, Strayer, Phoenix and others. Ironically, Mother Jones published a scathing indictment of these very school models in 2014.
  • But what's the key difference between Laureate and the other big for-profits? Whereas ITT and DeVry primarily operate in the US domestic market, Laureate is a worldwide phenomenon and the majority of its students/customers are from Latin America. Many of the same shenanigans that apparently would not be either legal or acceptable in the USA are somewhat legal there. The Washington Post states that it is the largest for-profit higher ed network in the world, with 800,000.
  • The same for-profit college practices criticized by higher ed advocates here in the USA are employed very flexibly by Laureate. Its purchase of the Brazilian Institute of Medicine and Rehabilitation was met with major cuts in staff and the purchase of others caused massive instructor union protests.
Some have made the case, a precarious one but you can entertain it below, that for-profit higher ed is just the result of the vastly inflated value of public colleges.
The truth is that the for-profits have not been very effective either. But comparing Trump's pathetic seminar to Clinton's job with Laureate, basically a no-show job, is not possible. Trump should have to answer in the legal sense for that in CIVIL court and I don predict a judgment against him. But Trump U is, as he would say, "small potatoes" in comparison to Laureate's worldwide diploma mill powerhouse.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did the "Dancing Israeli" theorists actually read the FBI file?

Image
A few months ago a friend of mine, like myself Jewish, suggested to me that there would be forthcoming indictments of Israeli agents for involvement in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was convinced that documents slated for declassification would shine a light on an operation by Israel's Mossad that had either prior knowledge or involvement in the plot.  I would be remiss if I did not admit that for years controversial historical events, what are popularly panned as "conspiracy theories", are a topic that has fascinated me. But I've always had a blind spot for the 9/11 theories mostly because there were so many of them, and it is difficult to distinguish serious questions from spaced out hyperbolic speculation. And sure, I'll also admit that the idea that there could have been a nefarious plot to topple the Twin Towers and pull the USA into wars in the Middle East made me uncomfortable. After all, my own family hails f
Read more

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Anti-Semitism Canard

Image
House Intelligence Committee counsel Daniel Goldman with committee chair Adam Schiff during the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump's communications with Ukraine. ( Ha'aretz ) The so-called Jewish "leadership" has scuttled American Jews' future Recently my aunt, who is almost 70 years old, told us that the current climate is the most anti-Semitic that she's seen in the USA having lived here her entire life. But I had to struggle to keep myself from saying how surprised I was that it wasn't worse. And I'm not the only one as a friend, like myself also Jewish, has observed the House impeachment hearings and said to me "this is bad for the Jews" for weeks on end. He says this because a glaringly prominent selection of people, from the heads of the committees (Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler), to their majority counsels (Norm Eisen and Daniel Goldman), to the witnesses (Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman), to the experts (Pamela Karlan
Read more

A year later Ryan Dawson is Addicted to Lies, Part 1

Image
 As I'm writing this it is the week after the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the event that defined my generation just as Vietnam defined the generation of baby boomers. It is a bitter day for many reasons. On the one hand there is the largely held sentiment that the almost three thousand victims of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Another reason compounding it is the lack of transparency by the US government and various other governments regarding the events leading up to the tragic attacks. And yet on top of that is the fact that opportunistic hoaxers have taken it upon themselves to take advantage of that lack of transparency and use the available information to concoct lies and canards in order to fit their worldview. In 2019 I debated one such person, Ryan Dawson of ANC Report. Typically I have the urge to find something redeeming in one of my opponents, but with respect to him the longer the exposure to his material the easier it is to see th
Read more