We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself;
.. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?
.. Some prominent Republicans are already suggesting that, rather than enforcing the ethics laws, Congress should simply change them to accommodate the great man.
.. Some Trump apologists have even taken to declaring that we needn’t worry about corruption from the incoming clique, because rich men don’t need more money. Seriously.
.. Not incidentally, James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose intervention almost surely swung the election, had previously worked for the Whitewater committee, which spent seven years obsessively investigating a failed land deal.
.. Indeed, America botched the occupation of Iraq in part thanks to profiteering by politically connected businesses.
Donald Trump says he wants to fix cities. Ben Carson will make them worse.
While Carson was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University medical school, located in one of the nation’s poorest and most troubled big cities, he took little interest in urban issues. In his ill-fated primary campaign, he railed against “social engineering,” a swipe at efforts to open housing in mostly well-to-do, overwhelmingly white communities to minority home buyers and renters.
.. Trump’s selection of Carson echoes Ronald Reagan’s choice of Samuel Pierce as his HUD secretary. Like Trump, Reagan had lashed out against inner cities and pledged to slash social spending. Like Trump’s supporters, the majority of Reagan’s voters did not live in cities. And like Trump, he had little support among African Americans. But like Trump, Reagan wanted a black face in a high place for a little legitimacy in a post-civil-rights-movement White House. And, like Trump, Reagan had pledged to loosen housing and financial regulations.
.. HUD was an easy target for Reagan, as it is for Trump. It had been created by Lyndon B. Johnson at the peak of his Great Society to meet the huge demand for affordable housing in American cities and to grapple with the ravages of mass suburbanization, nearly complete racial segregation and capital flight from cities, all of which had been heavily bankrolled by the federal government.
.. In 1968, HUD took on the additional responsibility of “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the gargantuan task of undoing decades of discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices.
.. None of these missions was popular: Republicans criticized HUD as a meddling “big government” agency. Southern Democrats railed against its civil rights goals. And suburban whites fiercely resisted even modest efforts to open the housing market to racial minorities.
.. the department became a bastion of crony capitalism, particularly under Republican presidents.
.. real estate speculators and politically connected developers, who sold shabby houses to desperate buyers at above-market prices, backed by inflated appraisals
.. One of Pierce’s assistant secretaries resigned when it came out that HUD staffers had helped him type and proofread his book, “Privatizing the Public Sector.”
.. Staffers directed money to Republican-connected lawyers, consulting firms and developers. One of the dozens swept up in the resulting investigations by federal prosecutors and Congress was Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort , who had successfully lobbied for about $43 million in federal subsidies for a shabby New Jersey housing complex. He received $326,000 in fees
.. Like Pierce, Carson is shaping up to be a token black Cabinet member. Trump has not appointed any other black officials so far
.. We don’t know much yet about how Carson will run HUD, but his lack of experience with urban policy, his bromides about socialist planning, his indifference to fair housing and his calls for individual boot-strapping don’t bode well for the future of metropolitan America. And in a climate of privatization and deregulation, championed by the country’s new real estate developer in chief, Carson’s inexperience could be a serious liability.
How ‘Islands of Honesty’ Can Crush a System of Corruption
experts say, the recent scandals may in fact be cautiously good news. They show that prosecutors and other institutions have managed to break free of those systems and hold their leaders to account — with overwhelming public support for that accountability when they do.
.. And the benefits of staying honest decline, because everybody is cutting in front of you in line to see the doctor, or winning the contracts that you might have had a decent chance of getting.”
.. A new equilibrium will take hold — one that favors dishonest dealings.
That kind of corrupt equilibrium is the background to South Korea’s current scandal.
.. Unmarried and childless, she highlighted her lack of close family as an asset to her presidency because so many previous scandals had involved steering assets to children or spouses.
.. Once a corrupt equilibrium is in place, experts say, it cannot be stopped until public trust in the government’s institutions and leaders is restored. That is why the investigations that have led to scandals in South Korea, Brazil, and elsewhere are so significant.
.. institutions are only strong when you believe in them
.. I don’t want to say that our institutions only exist in our minds, but really that’s true. What is the rule of law except that we ultimately believe that we ought to follow certain rules?”
But in corrupt systems that belief is often missing, because the institutions that are supposed to provide accountability are often weakened through bribery, threats, and other illicit means.
.. In Russia, control over both political power and corruption is concentrated among a small group of politicians and the oligarchs in their inner circle, and no institution or prosecutor has enough power to challenge them.
..
“I call them ‘islands of honesty’” Professor Stefes said. Such investigations are not sufficient on their own to eradicate corruption, he said. “But they certainly can make a difference as soon as they start spreading, especially when they can connect with civil society.”
The ‘H-Bomb’ Fizzles: The Harvard Brand Takes a Hit
There exists a species of person — typically a well-groomed overachiever — who, when asked where he or she went to college, rather than state its name directly, will provide a Russian nesting doll set of geographical responses.
In New England. Massachusetts. Well, Boston. Um … Cambridge.
Finally, sotto voce, with an apologetic wince or sheepish smile, anticipating the word’s being volleyed back in an affected
.. that formerly contrived embarrassment may be ceding to sincere shame and a reassessment of the merits of a Harvard education.
.. Harvard had the sixth-most-reported rape cases on campus in 2014, and its law school figured prominently in the controversial documentary about campus sexual assault
.. Daniel Golden’s 2006 book, “The Price of Admission,” about how the rich buy their way into elite schools, has become newly relevant for its disclosure that Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received acceptance to Harvard despite an unremarkable academic record, possibly thanks to his father’s donation of $2.5 million.
.. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kushner denied the allegation, noting that Mr. Kushner graduated with honors; Mr. Golden observed that, in a climate of rampant grade inflation, so did about 90 percent of Mr. Kushner’s graduating class of 2003.
.. The acquisitive-rather-than-inquisitive Harvard grad is not a baseless stereotype: Nearly two-fifths of the class of 2016 said they were going into finance or consulting
.. By comparison, just 6 percent went into nonprofit or public service work, and 4 percent into education.
.. In fairness to Harvard, it asks no contribution from families making less than $65,000 per year and provides sliding-scale tuition for those earning more. The New York Times 2015 College Access Index, measuring schools’ efforts to promote economic diversity, ranked it 11th over all and fourth among private colleges, far ahead of places better known for their diversity, such as Oberlin (ranked 132nd).
However, its ratio of federal Pell Grant recipients (for low-income students) to endowment per student is much less impressive.
.. over a third of the student body comes from families earning more than $250,000 a year (the wealthiest 4 percent of households), with more students from the $500,000-and-up 1 percenters than $40,000-and-below families.
.. A 2005 book, “Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education,” determined that, all else being equal, top schools do not offer any admission advantage to low-income students, despite lip service to the contrary.
.. Some parents, though, including alumni, are rebelling against the Harvard-or-bust mentality, not only because of the stresses it places on their overworked children, but from misgivings about the conformist and careerist atmosphere of the Ivy Leagues.
.. “I would like my kids to find their passion, take risks and be curious, engaged, educated people,”
.. “Elite schools discourage kids from being that; they want them to build résumés, to build careers, to be cautious. The kinds of people who go to Harvard tend to be people who succeed by traditional metrics, and that continues after Harvard. I’d like my kids not to be so beholden to those metrics.”
.. “only privileged people” like himself “can afford not to be concerned” about the attainment of privilege.
.. he encounters more students who question whether going to a prestigious school “is something that’s really going to make me happy and lead to a fulfilling life.”
“But there’s a feeling like you don’t have a choice” in an increasingly aristocratic society in which one’s college is a primary determinant of status, he added.
.. what privilege says about each of our characters — makes us uncomfortable. Our privilege forces us to question our worthiness and our merit, two of the things most highly valued at an institution like this one.”