One cautionary example is
President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard,
according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How
America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the
university. Jared got his
Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-
media taunts precisely because his daddy had to
pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The
cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost
of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.
Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-
media taunts precisely because his daddy had to
pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The
cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost
of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.
CITY
JOURNAL
WHAT
THE COLLEGE-ADMISSIONS
SCANDAL TELL US ABOUT AMERICA’S
BROKEN MERITOCRACY
SCANDAL TELL US ABOUT AMERICA’S
BROKEN MERITOCRACY
If, like
me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and
status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what
investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a
rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new
details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!”
as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed.
But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have
here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.
The
story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing
landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems
deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William
“Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company.
Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker
children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture
of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old
Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an
agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer
hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores
would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My
favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the
eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the
extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer
set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing]
guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the
world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.
The
charitable donors are a treasure trove of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up farce.
Jane Buckingham, Beverly Hills mother and businesswoman, paid Singer $50,000 to
have Ridell take her son’s ACT for him so that he could score high enough to
get into the University of Southern California; Ridell got the boy a 35 out of
36. Earlier in her career, Buckingham had parlayed her expertise as a “youth
marketing specialist” into a TV show, Job or No Job, offering millennials career advice.
Evidently she forgot what she told an interviewer at the Observerwhen
she described some of the young people who came on her show as “so entitled
that you want to slap them.” Another donor was Willkie Farr & Gallagher
co-chair Gordon Caplan, named as The American Lawyer’s 2018 Dealmaker of the Year. Also in the lineup
are actress Felicity Huffman and her husband William Macy, most recently star
of a television series called—will the dark irony never stop?—Shameless. For
reasons not entirely clear, Macy has not yet been indicted.
First
prize for sheer gall goes to actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer
husband Massimo Giannulli. The two paid Singer a half-million to package their
daughters as accomplished rowers in order to buy their place in the University
of Southern California freshman class, though evidently neither girl knew the difference
between a coxswain and an entry on Pornhub. Nor, at least in Olivia’s case,
were they thinking much about their course load. As it happens, Olivia spent
the first week of school in Fiji. She wasn’t there to visit the renowned
libraries of the South Pacific, but for a photo shoot in her role as a “social
media influencer.” Using the stage name Olivia Jade, she video-splained to her
1.9 million followers that, while she would be doing a lot of traveling for her
career, “I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying. I don’t really
care about school, as you guys all know.”
A
few final, irresistible details about the dewy Loughlin: the actress made her
name on the hit sitcom Full House. She played Aunt Becky to the golden-girl
Olsen twins. Aunt Becky was supposed to be the show’s moral compass; in one
episode, she marched into the office of a preschool admissions director to tell
on her husband for lying on his niece’s application. Back in the real world,
Loughlin went on to groom her own daughter for a future on the red
carpet—witness the Internet photos of the luminous mother and daughter posing
at celebrity events and gabbing on The Today Show. It seems unlikely that Olivia Jade
could have collected her Sephora, Amazon, and Dolce Gabbana deals on her own;
her doting mother was the influencer there. In short, the Hallmark-wholesome
Aunt Becky turns out to be a modern-day Becky Sharp.
This
kind of arrogance, greed, and ambition has been the stuff of literary satire
and philosophical reflection throughout the ages. What sets Operation Varsity
Blues apart and caused the public outrage, of course, is its American context.
The parents were not seeking riches, fame, or even elite status in any
conventional sense: they already had that. Between the two of them, Felicity
Huffman and Bill Macy are estimated to be worth $45 million; their daughters
would never be lacking in American Express black cards or invitations to
friends’ Aspen chalets. Olivia Jade was already on her way to online stardom,
at least within her peer group.
No,
they were not looking for financial rewards or klieg lights. What they wanted
was for their kids to fit in as members of the cognitive elite. Anand
Giridharadas, NBC political analyst and fire-and-brimstone scourge of America’s
richest, tweeted about the scandal that America’s ruling class “confuses its
privilege for merit.” That’s exactly backward. The Operation Varsity parents
opened their wallets precisely because they knew their children did not have the
right stuff. They wanted elite status for their children, and in a meritocracy,
even one as tattered as our own, high SATs and extracurriculars leading to a
hoity-toity college degree are the ticket. The parents of Operation Varsity
will probably get over the humiliation of a mugshot, but their kids will never
live down being outed as meritocratic losers.
Which
takes us to the only good news in this whole sordid affair: buying your way
into cognitive-elite respectability is trickier than anyone thought. Even if
you avoid jail, you are surrounded by people who are expert at sniffing out
meritocratic poseurs, namely those with modest IQs. One cautionary example is
President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard,
according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How
America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges,
was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his
Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely
because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost
of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff?
Priceless.
The
current system of college admission doesn’t have many defenders at this point.
Everyone knows that it corrupts us all: the high school teachers who feel
obliged to inflate the talents of their ordinary students, the therapists
selling their professional credentials to parents who want special-disability
diagnoses for their healthy kids so that they have extra time to take their
exams, the middle-class parents who have neither the funds nor the stomach to
violate the law but help create the panic that is driving their kids (and their
educators) out of their minds. Worst of all, it demoralizes less-advantaged
kids and their parents, who are already tempted toward resentment-filled
hopelessness.
For
all higher education’s sins, though, there’s no easy way to fix its role in the
broken meritocracy. Limit legacies and sports admits? Sure. Look skeptically at
résumés filled with service trips to Guatemalan villages and computer camps?
Yes, please. But an increasingly high-tech economy will have to reward those
who can decipher complicated deals, program robots, and pursue similarly
complex cognitive tasks. The challenge is to reduce the prestige and honor
attached to those talents and rewards—and to the schools that develop them.
Ironically, Operation Varsity Blues may be a step in that direction.
NOW WHY
SHOULD AMERICANS (LEGALS) PAY FOR AN EDUCATION WHEN THE SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP IS
BRINGING OVER BOATLOADS OF “CHEAP” LABOR WHO ALL RECEIVED FREE EDUCATIONS?!?!
Ivanka
Trump Wants America to Kick Addiction to Four-Year College, Massive Student
Debt
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/03/21/ivanka-trump-wants-america-kick-addiction-four-year-college/
Watch–Wells Fargo CEO Grilled for Outsourcing American Jobs to India
5:29
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan was grilled during a congressional hearing this week for the multinational corporation’s outsourcing scheme that has left thousands of Americans out of work.
Last year, Wells Fargo executives announced that about 26,500 employees at the company would be laid off after years of the corporation’s outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs to India and the Philippines. In 2017, about 650 American workers were laid off by Wells Fargo in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington.
At the same time, Americans were being laid off, the multinational bank announced it would hire an additional 7,000 workers in the Philippines to add to its 4,000-strong workforce in the country.
In 2018, Wells Fargo executives said nearly 640 American workers would soon be let go and would not certify that those jobs would not be sent to India or the Philippines, as has been the case in the past.
Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) questioned Sloan over the corporation’s outsourcing of American jobs. In one case, Axne explained, a Wells Fargo worker in Des Moines, Iowa was allegedly told by executives that her job was being moved to India.
Axne also detailed cases where Wells Fargo employees in Des Moines were allegedly sent to India to train their foreign replacements and have trained their replacements through “virtual classrooms” before they were laid off.
The exchange went as follows:
AXNE: In September 2018 Wells Fargo announced it planned to reduce its work force by laying off as many as 26,000 workers. In November 2018, Wells announced it was laying off 1,000 employees – 400 of those were in Des Moines, correct?SLOAN: We never announced that we were going to layoff up to 26,000 employees. what I said at a town hall where I —AXNE: Did you layoff 400 employees in Des Moines?SLOAN: I was referring to the first part of your question. That’s not an accurate statement. Generally what I said was that between — that over the next three years, we expect our total employment to reduce by between five and 10% —AXNE: I’m concerned about the people in my District. Were 400 of those people in Des Moines?SLOAN: 400 folks were displaced in Des Moines.AXNE: What was the reason for that layoff in Des Moines?SLOAN: It depended upon their job. Some of those folks were displaced because of the fact that the amount of servicing demand that we had in the mortgage servicing business had declined. There were other reasons —AXNE: I have a signed affidavit here saying that an employee in Des Moines was told her job was being moved to India and employees in that area have gone to India to train those replacements and I’ve heard from employees that are using your virtual classrooms for that same purpose to train other people in other companies. Are these recent layoffs really just you moving jobs overseas?SLOAN: No. That’s incorrect.AXNE: You’ve added more than 10,000 employees between India and the Philippines in the last five years and I know you’re building a new facility in Philippines for another 7,000 employees I believe. Can we expect that more of your planned layoffs are going to be jobs moved overseas?SLOAN: No. I don’t believe that’s going to be the case. We have 20,000 job opening at Wells Fargo today. 90% of those are here in the US, probably more than that. We hire between 40 and 50,000 —AXNE: I fail to understand, though, how we’re laying people off in this country and building jobs overseas. thank you.
In Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District in 2018, there were more than 2,000 H-1B foreign visa workers employed at a variety of companies earning mostly between $60,000 to $80,000 a year — U.S. jobs that would have otherwise gone to American middle class professionals. Wells Fargo, as of 2018, employed 36 H-1B foreign visa workers in Iowa’s 3rd District.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans a year potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Wells Fargo has consistently imported foreign workers through the H-1B visa program to take high-paying, white-collar U.S. jobs. Between 2015 and 2017, Wells Fargo tried to import nearly 400 foreign workers to take jobs in the U.S.
Cheap, foreign labor is the most prominent driver of multinational corporations outsourcing American workers’ jobs to third-world nations.
For instance, while the average yearly American family’s income is roughly $73,000, the average family’s income in the Phillippines is about $5,200 U.S. dollars, making it a haven for multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor, lay off Americans, and widen executives’ profit margins.
Outsourcing and the offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been embraced by multinational corporations. Corporations like AT&T, Harley-Davidson, Ralph Lauren, Nike, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: You were wondering how many jobs went to illegals and how well Obama’s crony banksters have done???
By PAUL BEDARD
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.
US jobs numbers highlight global
growth concerns
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Consequently, the pumping of ultra-cheap money into the financial system, fueling speculation and parasitism, together with ever-widening social inequality, is not a temporary measure but must be made permanent.
The declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into the retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the issue.
Workers’ wages have seen little to no growth in the last
four decades, and any economic growth experienced
since 2008 has gone to the rich.
four decades, and any economic growth experienced
since 2008 has gone to the rich.
“US household net worth sees biggest fall since crisis”
The past 40 years have seen the
consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has
subordinated every aspect of American
society to a single goal: amassing ever more
colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top
one percent have captured all of the increase
in national income over the past two decades,
and all of the increase in national wealth since
the 2008 crash.
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