Application and acceptance season is underway at America’s colleges and universities. But this year, some institutions of higher learning may see a noticeable dip in attendance from one group purposely choosing to stay home: foreign students.
Applications from international students from countries such as China, India and in particular, the Middle East, are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Educators, recruiters and school officials report that the perception of America has changed for international students, and it just doesn’t seem to be as welcoming a place anymore. Officials point to the Trump administration’s rhetoric surrounding immigration and the issuing of a travel ban as having an effect.
“Yes, we definitely are sounding the warning,” said Melanie Gottlieb, deputy director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, adding, “We would hope that the [Trump] administration would say [to] cool the rhetoric a bit around immigration.”
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is a feature not a bug as far as Trump and his supporters are concerned. They don’t want foreigners in the country. They see this as a success.
The tourist industry is complaining of lost profits too. But again, this is considered a good thing as far as the Trump faction is concerned.
It will be interesting to see how people feel about rising prices when Trump tries to do to trade agreements what he tried to do with health care. He and his supporters seem not to realize that foreign countries don’t have to do exactly what Trump tells them to do. And remember, the great negotiator actually knows next to nothing about trade deals and has never successfully done a bigger deal than a single building project or a license to slap his name on some ugly ties. When he tried to go bigger in Atlantic City he lost his shirt. Four times.
This is an excellent report from CNN on the way Trumpcare went down to defeat and well worth reading all the way through. But this excerpt, I thought, pretty much nailed the problem, at least as far as the President was concerned:
Staff was for details, Trump was for closing,” said one senior congressional aide. When it came to details, Trump “didn’t know, didn’t care, or both.”
He didn’t answer their specific questions about the bill, according to three members of Congress who attended the meetings. He didn’t offer any arguments for why they should support the legislation other than to give him his first legislative victory.
Trump repeatedly focused instead on the politics of the broader situation, the people said. In the Oval Office, he quizzed the Republicans about the margin of victory in their districts last fall. His victory, not theirs.
“He did very little to say why we should vote ‘yes,’ ” one Republican member of Congress said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the White House. “He kept talking about his damn election.”
In the end, the man dubbed “the ultimate closer” could not close the deal.
He doesn’t know anything except himself which is all he can sell. They weren’t buying. And, in fact,they aren’t ever going to be in the market for that. These politician aren’t like his adoring worshippers. The might care about ideology or power or money. But if it comes down choosing between themselves and Donald Trump it’s no contest. He, of all people, should understand that.
When Norma Rae first hit theaters in 1979, I watched it in a packed movie house in West Hollywood with a friend from Greenville South Carolina. The textile mill Norma Rae worked in looked like one of the dying mills on the west (poor) side of Greenville. Partway through the tale of troubled union organizing in the South, I leaned over and whispered we were probably the only people in the theater to realize the film was not a period piece.
Looking ahead at what the economy has in store for a lot of Americans, that “period” is coming back.
Jia Tolentino writes in the New Yorker about the “gig economy” that celebrates working yourself to death. She begins with a cheery marketing tale of a Lyft driver going into labor who stops to take another fare on her way to the hospital. That’s the spirit!
It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
A Fiverr press release on the campaign states,
“The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic.
No, really. You’re not being exploited. You’re experiencing greater freedom as an independent contractor living lean and on the edge as part of the emerging zeitgeist. You’re “connecting, having fun, and killing it!” Lyricism like that got Arthur Dent thrown out of a Vogon airlock. On the 106th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Matthew Dessem examines how the company’s proprietors might have used such marketing upspeak to rebrand their sweatshop as a “hip, open-plan workplace” where partners won’t have to “wander the confusing maze of government bureaucracies looking for an exit.”
Perhaps Donald Trump’s new Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, wrote that copy for Fiverr to make extra cash in his spare time. After all, in his first address, Carson presented his staff with an inspiring tale of immigrants who came to these shores for the opportunity to be a part of America’s exciting experiment in “can-do” capitalism: “That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.” They weren’t slaves. They weren’t human chattel. They were doers.
The Midas cult peddles this kind of delusional twaddle with a straight face. Believers celebrate (other) people working longer hours and into early graves as “uniquely American.” Normal. A recovering Oxycontin addict tells PBS News Hour [timestamp 6:12], “it’s the only thing that makes you feel normal. And it’s the farthest thing from normal.” But you can’t see that from the inside of either an addiction or an economic cult.
Truth may be dead, but it occasionally intrudes nonetheless on cult catechism. A study by Anne Case and Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton of Princeton University finds that in America the problem is not just people working themselves to death, but people not working themselves to death. The reprobation the Midas cult heaps on the long-term unemployed is such that excommunicates are treating their guilt and hopelessness with opioids or a bullet to the head. The Princeton researchers call them “deaths of despair.”
Angus Deaton: Mortality rates have been going down forever. There’s been a huge increase in life expectancy and reduction in mortality over 100 years or more, and then for all of this to suddenly go into reverse [for whites ages 45 to 54], we thought it must be wrong. We spent weeks checking out numbers because we just couldn’t believe that this could have happened, or that if it had, someone else must have already noticed. It seems like we were right and that no one else had picked it up.
We knew the proximate causes — we know what they were dying from. We knew suicides were going up rapidly, and that overdoses mostly from prescription drugs were going up, and that alcoholic liver disease was going up. The deeper questions were why those were happening — there’s obviously some underlying malaise, reasons for which we [didn’t] know.
Anne Case: These deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health. So we are beginning to thread a story in that it’s possible that [the trend is] consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree. In turn, those people are being less able to form stable marriages, and in turn that has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive.
In general, the longer you’re in the labor force, the more you earn — in part because you understand your job better and you’re more efficient at your job, you’ve had on-the-job training, you belong to a union, and so your wages go up with age. That’s happened less and less the later and later you’ve been born and the later you enter this labor market.
Deaton: We’re thinking of this in terms of something that’s been going on for a long time, something that’s emerged as the iceberg has risen out of the water. We think of this as part of the decline of the white working class. If you go back to the early ’70s when you had the so-called blue-collar aristocrats, those jobs have slowly crumbled away and many more men are finding themselves in a much more hostile labor market with lower wages, lower quality and less permanent jobs. That’s made it harder for them to get married. They don’t get to know their own kids. There’s a lot of social dysfunction building up over time. There’s a sense that these people have lost this sense of status and belonging. And these are classic preconditions for suicide.
The Los Angeles Times account reports on several factors behind the spike, including “the widespread erosion of institutions that provided stability in American life for much of the 20th century: the manufacturing industry, the church, unions and stable marriage.” The second item in that list is none of the government’s business. But we might strengthen the first and the third through public policy, and thereby reinforce the last. Problem is, the Midas cult’s systematic policy for decades has been to encourage offshoring of manufacturing and to discourage formation of unions in pursuit of wealth maximization for the priest class. Meanwhile, it’s just fine with the company if those working longer hours for less and those who aren’t working at all owe their souls to the company store. As I said, that period is making a comeback.
Case and Deaton believe the damage done is the result of “cumulative disadvantage over life” that will take years to reverse. But so far, there are only promises of better times from policymakers whose focus is on reelection and the the economy rather than on the people in or victimized by it.
When Trump’s replacement candidate for labor secretary, R. Alexander Acosta, faced confirmation hearings last week, the New York Times reports,
.. his testimony suggests that as labor secretary his primary goal would not be to look out for workers by promoting fair pay and workplace safety. Instead, he seems more interested in shielding employers from having to address those concerns.
[…]
Mr. Acosta’s answers to questions about other worker protections were also troubling. He would not commit to upholding a Labor Department rule, set to take effect in April, that would require financial advisers to put clients’ interests first when giving advice or selling investments for 401(k) rollovers or other retirement-related transactions. Nor would he commit to enforcing a rule to protect construction workers from carcinogenic dust.
But they’ll defend a worker’s right to work for less, and to grow another day older and deeper in debt.
With this week’s collapse of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, Democrats have an opportunity to step into the power vacuum and offer Americans something better. Bernie Sanders announced he would:
“We have got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies and move forward toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” on Friday night. “And I’ll be introducing legislation shortly to do that.”
That’s laudable, timely and symbolic, but not enough. Sanders is still an outlier. Both Republicans and Democrats are still too closely allied with the financialized economy and in the thrall of the cult. If not of Midas, then Rand. People need work, decent-paying work, not just for keeping a roof over their heads, but to maintain their dignity and mental health.
Sitting in that theater watching Norma Rae, I wondered how many sitting around me might think it a reflection of a time gone by. Now I worry it was predictive of a time coming back.
Just watch it through your fingers: Donald Cried ***
By Dennis Hartley
In my 2014 tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, I wrote:
You know how I know Philip Seymour Hoffman was a great actor? Because he always made me cringe. You know what I mean? It’s that autonomic flush of empathetic embarrassment that makes you cringe when a couple has a loud spat at the table next to you in a restaurant, or a drunken relative tells an off-color joke at Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a good sign when an actor makes me cringe, because that means he or she has left their social filter on the dressing room table, and shown up for work naked and unafraid.
There are many things about Donald Cried that will likely make you cringe. In fact, the film’s titular character (played by its writer-director Kris Avedisian) is the type of role Hoffman would have felt quite comfortable tackling…expressly for the purpose of making us feel uncomfortable.
A sort of twisty cross between Vincent Gallo’s cringe-inducing black comedy Buffalo ’66 and Miguel Arteta’s equally discomfiting character study Chuck & Buck , Avedisian’s story centers on a thirty-something Wall Street banker named Peter (Jesse Wakeman) who returns to the blue-collar Rhode Island burg where he grew up to bury his grandmother and tidy up all of her affairs.
During his taxi ride from the train station to his late grandmother’s house, Peter realizes (much to his chagrin) that he has lost his wallet while in transit. Quickly exhausting all other options for assistance, the panicked Peter has little choice but to walk across the street, where his childhood pal Donald lives. We quickly glean why he just didn’t go there first-Donald is beyond the beyond.
Donald is overjoyed to see Peter again after all these years. Disturbingly overjoyed, like a deliriously happy puppy who dances around your legs like a dervish because he was sure you were abandoning him forever when you left the house for 2 minutes to check the mail. In other words. Donald seems oblivious to the time-space continuum. While Peter has chosen to put away childish things and engage the world of adult responsibility, Donald was frozen in carbonite at 15.
Still, if Peter is to stick to his timetable of wrapping up the grandmother business in 24 hours, Donald (who has a car) looks to be his only hope. From their first stop at the funeral home, it’s clear that Donald’s complete lack of a social filter is going to make this a painfully long 24 hours.
The tortuous path of the “man-child” is rather well-trod, particularly in modern indie filmdom. That said, there is a freshness to Avedisian’s take, as well as an intimate authenticity to the performances that invites empathy from the viewer. Once you get past the cringe-factor, you actually do care about the characters, especially when you realize we’ve all known a Donald (or a Peter) sometime or another. Perchance we’ve even seen one looking back at us from a mirror, no?
During his news conference on Friday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer tried to argue that President Trump couldn’t possibly have worked harder in his unsuccessful effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Spicer also said Trump planned to spend a “working weekend” in Washington, D.C.
But on Saturday, Trump headed to a golf course for the 12th time during the nine weeks he’s been president. And by visiting the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia, Trump — who repeatedly ripped President Obama for his much less-frequent golf outings and promised he “would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done” during the campaign — has now visited a Trump-branded property for eight straight weekends. That covers all but the very first weekend of his presidency.
White House pool reporter Adrian Carrasquillo reports that it’s unclear what Trump is doing at his golf course.
Carrasquillo reports that Trump staffers said the president was there for meetings. But Trump has previously misled the press about what he’s up to at his golf courses.
I’m guessing he’s golfing. The pool report says he’s disappeared for three hours and they’re stuck at the tennis courts waiting around for some word. Trump does this.
I wouldn’t begrudge him his golf week-ends if he hadn’t been such as jerk about Obama’s much rarer golf outings and relentlessly ragged on Clinton for her alleged lack of stamina while promising that he was going to be working around the clock when he got to the White House. He’s a spoiled rich princeling who likes to insult and degrade others for being lazy and weak when he’s the lazy and weak one.
And his offspring aren’t too bright either:
Trump’s latest trip to one of his properties comes a day after Forbes broke news that Eric Trump plans to give his father quarterly updates about how Trump’s sprawling business empire is doing financially. Trump has refused to divest from his business, putting him in a unique position to profit off the presidency.
“Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it,” Eric Trump said, in reference to what he’ll brief his father on. “My father and I are very close… I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”
There’s lots more at the link about the latest examples of Trump’s ongoing corruption in the White House.
President Donald Trump’s daughter, her husband Jared Kushner, their children and the President’s other son Eric reportedly required 100 Secret Service agents to travel with the group for the trip.
The US Secret Service, funded by the US taxpayer, is reported to have spent $12,208 on rental ski equipment and clothing at the Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club.
Dozens of residents staged an impromptu protest to voice their opposition to the president’s cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency.
According to various news reports, Trump is unhappy that Jared and Ivanka were absent during the health care battle. Not enough to tell them they had to come back, though.
It was clearly Moore’s intention that Trumpland (filmed October 7 and released a scant 2 weeks afterwards) would ideally be seen by as many people as possible before November 8. However, he was careful to cover all his bases. If there is one consistency about Michael Moore’s films, it is that they are prescient…and already, I can identify at least one nail he hit squarely on the head.
This comes in the form of another speculative scenario Moore lays out, this one for Trump supporters to envision, should the election go their way. Moore assures them that he feels their pain; as a fellow Midwesterner from a manufacturing town in neighboring Michigan, he “gets” the frustrations that have been building up within the ranks of a certain white, working-class demographic, why they are feeling squeezed out, and why Trump might appear to be their savior.
Suddenly, in a wonderfully theatrical flourish, Moore seems to shape-shift into a Trump voter. He talks about how they are going to feel on Election Day, how incredibly empowering it will be to put that “x” in the Trump box on their ballot card. It’s going to be the “…biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history” when their boy takes the White House. “It’s going to feel REAL good,” Moore assures them, “for about…a week.” Uh-oh. “A week?” What’s he mean by that?
It will kind of be like Brexit, Moore explains after a suitable dramatic pause to let things soak in. Remember how eager the Brexit supporters were to shake things up in their country, and give a big “fuck you” to Europe? Sure, they “won”. But then, buyer’s regret set in. There was even a desperate stab to petition for a re-vote, spearheaded by many of the very people who supported it!
OK, so maybe Trump voters haven’t quite reached that stage yet, but they will. Their soon-to-be Fearless Leader is sending up oodles of red flags with kleptocratic cabinet appointment after kleptocratic cabinet appointment. Now, that seems to be in direct contradiction to his campaign stance as champion of the working class…d’ya think? So…just give them time (and pitchforks).
Well, at least one Trump voter has had an epiphany about the man who wrote The Art of the Con Deal. One down, 59,999,999 to go.
Paul Manafort stood in the foyer of the third-floor ballroom of the Charles Hotel, across the street from the Taubman Building of the Harvard Kennedy School, on Wednesday. Having left his mafioso uniform of gleaming pinstripe suit and tie at home in favor of a half-zip sweater and casual slacks, he went mostly unnoticed, even at an event for political operatives and junkies, where a man of his status should be a star. And Harvard, it turns out, is not the only place the ex-chairman of the Donald Trump presidential campaign and former lobbyist for some of the worst dictators and killers of the 20th century is operating in the shadows these days.
According to two sources with knowledge of the Trump presidential transition process, Manafort—whose formal association with the president-elect ended in August—is heavily involved with the staffing of the nascent administration.
Manafort was hired by the Trump campaign in April. A veteran political operative and lobbyist who’d worked on the Republican conventions nominating everyone from Gerald Ford to Bob Dole, he was cut from a different cloth than the novices who’d worked for Trump since his 2015 announcement. His presence was viewed as an effort to professionalize the operation and to herd delegates for the upcoming convention in July, which at that time looked as though it might be contested.
But immediately, there was a clash of egos between Manafort, whose official title was campaign chairman, and then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, a notoriously short-fused man who’d never run a presidential campaign before. When Lewandowski was eventually let go in late June, it seemed a victory for Manafort—but it wouldn’t last for long.
Amid a stream of investigative journalism scrutinizing his political work in Ukraine, of particular interest given Trump’s praise of autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin, Manafort was axed and replaced by a combination of Steve Bannon, the president of Breitbart News, and Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, who served as the campaign CEO and manager, respectively.
How far he faded into the margins of Trump’s orbit is unclear.
Even in his role as the campaign’s chairman, Manafort was not exactly visible, save for the odd Sunday show appearance. And Lewandowski, after being fired and taking a job as a cable TV pundit, continued to receive payment from the campaign and advise the candidate. Manafort, who keeps an apartment in Trump Tower, was never compensated for his work, making it more difficult to keep an account of his entanglement with the campaign.
But now, a few months and an election night victory later, it seems Manafort is back, and in a position he surely finds more comfortable: one shrouded in almost total mystery.
“When they’re picking a cabinet, unless he contacts me, I don’t bother him,” one former campaign official who worked closely with Manafort told The Daily Beast. “It’s a heady time for everyone.”
“I think he’s weighing in on everything,” the former official said, “I think he still talks to Trump every day. I mean, Pence? That was all Manafort. Pence is on the phone with Manafort regularly.”
As a lobbyist, Manafort is particularly concerned with decisions the president-elect might make that will affect his industry, the former official explained. “A guy like Manafort tries to make sure that the government is as comfortable for business as possible. He wants names he knows on every door.”
“He’s not worried as much about who’s the secretary of HHS,” the former official added, “as he is about who’s the secretary of HUD.”
Another Trump campaign source who worked alongside Manafort confirmed to The Daily Beast that he is heavily involved in selecting the incoming administration’s “personnel picks.”
When The Daily Beast caught up with Manafort sometime later, he would neither confirm nor deny his presence on the Trump transition team.
“I don’t want to get into that,” he said. “I’m here to talk about the campaign, I don’t want to talk about transition.”
When pressed on the issue, he reemphasized, “no comment,” before continuing a conversation with several other people.
Meanwhile in Cambridge, Conway, who now acts as a senior adviser to the president-elect, was making her way through the hotel lobby for check-in.
She told The Daily Beast she had “no comment” on the Manafort matter. “But I can research that and get back to you,” she added.
She winked and continued walking with her roller bag.
Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, later told The Daily Beast, “Paul Manafort has no association with the transition team or communication with the President-elect.”
Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, reportedly bamboozled his boss into switching his vice presidential pick from embattled New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) by staging an airplane malfunction.
In July, The New York Times reported that Trump and Pence “impromptu dinner” after the GOP candidate’s plane was grounded by “mechanical problems.”
“And at some point during the evening, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Pence if he would say yes, were Mr. Trump to offer him the No. 2 slot,” according to the Times.
But a Sunday report in the New York Post revealed that Manafort took the dramatic step of lying to Trump about mechanical problems with the plane after his boss tentatively selected Christie for the V.P. slot.
“Trump had wanted Christie but Bridgegate would have been the biggest national story,” Trump source told the Post. “He’d lose the advantage of not being corrupt.”
Manafort left the campaign in August after question arose about his business ties with Russia.
and Miguel Arteta’s equally discomfiting character study 
, Avedisian’s story centers on a thirty-something Wall Street banker named Peter (Jesse Wakeman) who returns to the blue-collar Rhode Island burg where he grew up to bury his grandmother and tidy up all of her affairs. 
