All posts tagged "Ivy League"

The Trump administration ignored Justice Department investigators who told it to ditch a case that lacked any factual basis, per The New York Times.

According to a Tuesday article by The Times, the DOJ under President Donald Trump pushed investigators to find civil rights violations at three Ivy League universities, but when those investigators found none, it "sidelined" them.

The accusations came from a former DOJ civil rights lawyer, Haley Van Erem, and her colleagues, whose names were redacted, after Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released their account of the fiasco on Tuesday, according to The Times....

President Donald Trump's dealings with everything from Ukraine to Ivy League universities amount to blatant extortion, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote Friday.

"Trump isn’t a dealmaker; he is closer to an extortionist," Parker wrote. "At least he meets the definition of the term: someone who uses coercion or punishment to get what he wants."

Parker explained how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's "first lesson in the art of the deal" came in 2019, "when Trump essentially threatened to withhold $400 million in military aid if Zelensky didn’t investigate — or at least say he was investigating — Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine."...

[rebelmouse-image 24863033 original_size="250x220" expand=1]In my prior posts on the arrest of Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in his own home by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley I have mentioned that class privilege plays a role in this debacle as much as race does. A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but misses the big picture -- race and class are always factors because we are human beings colored by experiences and classification within this country's historical framework of those two elements.

It's so fun to watch hardcore capitalists try to parse out the recent troubles. Some of [Jesse, in this case] Malkin's commenters, at the risk of picking fruit hanging so low it's practically tuber, are truly bewildered: