Feedback from the Stupid People

Raghu Mathur joins a rinky dink local for-profit

"Global"

     As you know, I occasionally Google the name “Raghu P. Mathur.” I've tried to keep track of our former Chancellor.
     He's pursued politics, but his record has proved a difficult obstacle to overcome. He worked briefly for the for-profit (boo! hiss!), Argosy U. No surprise there. Mathur is, after all, a Republican.
     Tonight, my occasional Mathurian Googling yielded a new and curious factoid. I found that Raghu is now “Executive Vice President” of an outfit called “Study America,” based in the city of Orange, on beauteous The City Drive.
     According to SA’s website, Study America

is a global company that specializes in identifying quality students for quality schools. Study America provides a highly supported, custom-tailored international student experiences. Our service include assisting you with your application materials, acquiring your I-20, assisting with your housing needs, organizing language assistance tools, and preparing you to take the TOEFL. We can also assist you with any other program requirements….

     I'm not sure what they mean by calling their little company "global." Maybe somebody down there has a globe on his or her desk.
     The website further explains:

When we were international students studying in Los Angeles 25 years ago, we started Study America to encompass the services we wished we had, such as help with student visa forms, airport pick-up, housing assistance, cultural exchange opportunities, language training and more….

Website: Raghu is on the Study America "team."

     Here’s the Study America “team”:

William M. Vega, Ed.D., Chairman of the Board
Senator Richard Polanco (ret)., Executive Vice President International Relations
Abdi Lajevardi, Chief Executive Officer
Martin C. Yousef, Ed.D., Chief Operating Officer
Ali Ebrahimipour, Chief Information Officer
Tami Erickson, Ph.D., Vice President of Compliance
Raghu P. Mathur, ED. D., Executive Vice President, Academics
Uwe Gemba, Headmaster, American Summer Academy

     At least one name here, beyond Mathur's, will be familiar. Back in 2008, then-Chancellor Mathur hired former Coast Community College District Chancellor Bill Vega as a consultant—possibly at the direction of our accreditor (ACCJC)—to assess “decision making” at the colleges, something that wasn't working well, according to reports.
     Oddly, a day after Vega met with a hastily assembled group of noisy, complaining faculty, Mathur unhired Vega. Or something. It was all very odd. (See here and here.)
     (Fun fact: Vega recently finished a lucrative three-year gig at Dubai Men’s College. That's right: a "men's college" in freakin' Dubai. Concerning the latter, see Slaves of Dubai.)
     Most of the people working at Study America (SA) are small-time. There's Mathur, of course. Mr. Gemba has been associated with various troubled or failed for-profit institutions in Southern California (see Eucasia Schools Worldwide) for decades. Mr. Lajevardi, the CEO of SA, was President of United Education Institute (UEI), which got into hot water with the feds owing to funding hinkitude. Mr. Yousef is or was the Executive Director of the same dodgy for-profit trade school, UEI. I can find nothing about Mr. Ebrahimipour, which is odd given his alleged "past experiences [as] Vice President, CTO, and CIO...." A couple of these guys are local businessmen and I have discovered nothing interesting about them.
     On the other hand, Mr. Polanco, the Executive Vice President, International Relations, served in the State Assembly for eight years, then the State Senate.
     He then became a lobbyist. Money, money, money, baby.

Somewhere in this building

HUH?

A finger in many pies

     In the course of my brief Googling, I came across the name of a small, local for-profit institution called “American Heritage College” (AHC). It was founded in Orange in 2006.
     AHC has the same address as “Study America,” and it sports much of the same “team,” including Mathur! (Five of AHC's "faculty" are on the Study America "team." Mr. Lajevardi is the CEO of both AHC and SA.*)
     On its website, one learns that

American Heritage College is led by a team of highly experienced leaders in postsecondary education, and boasts a faculty composed of leading experts in a variety of fields, such as business, technology, health management, human resources, and more. Furthermore, with courses targeted toward working professionals, our passionate and motivated student body creates an inspiring environment for all.

     In reality, AHC is a tiny operation comprising about ten employees, including five of the folks mentioned above.

American Heritage College "faculty"

     Raghu is identified both as "faculty" and as a member of AHC's board.
     I poked around in AHC's website.
     Most of its programs appear to have no students, not just this year, but year after year. (See also here and here, etc.)
     According to its yearly report (to the Dept. of Consumer Affairs), AHC has a grand total of 27 enrollees, despite its having existed since 2006.
     In the college catalog, we’re told that “American Heritage College does not have any Articulation Agreement with any educational institution.”
     I can find no accreditation info about AHC. The AHC website doesn't mention accreditation. (I typed "accreditation" into their search engine and that yielded nothing.)
     Here’s AHC’s mission statement:

American Heritage College shall strive to provide the best training to individuals looking for an alternative to the traditional educational system; acquire the necessary skills to obtain employment in their chosen field or achieve their educational goals and realize their hopes and aspirations for a rewarding future. [My emphasis.]

     It all looks pretty half-assed.
     Here’s one of AHS/SA’s videos:


   
     More curious factoids. "American Heritage College" is trademarked. The owner of the trademark is 247 Classrooms LLC. 247's address is "abdi@studyamerica.me, 2445 West Chapman Avenue; Suite 260, Orange, CA 92868." (See Trademark File.) "abdi" is, of course, AHC CEO Lajevardi's given name. The street address (campus location) is also the (Chapman Ave.) address of American Harbor College, another small-time for-profit. (When I press the link to the "PHT [phlebotomy technician] fact sheet," I get instead the data for Harbor Career College, which is quite plainly located in Los Angeles. I don't get it.)
     The latter (AHC) seems to have three employees. (Under "instructors," only one person is identified, at least for ESL instruction.)
     Such organizations—and, of course, the much larger for-profits such as the U of Phoenix—are notorious for exploiting clueless young people, who take these schools' pricey (and often inferior or worthless) courses. These for-profits help students to secure loans guaranteed by the government—loans that, when taken to pay for inferior for-profit education, experience very high default rates. This means that the taxpayer foots the bill for such institutions' incompetent instruction and profit-making.
     Natch, Republicans have worked hard to protect this gravy train for years, but, in recent years, the Obama administration has made inroads in an effort to rein in these excesses.

THE MYSTERIOUS MR. LAJEVARDI

     *Curiously, Mr. Abdi Lajevardi, the CEO of both SA and AHC, is also the CEO of the business consulting firm “Pro Education Group” (the address of which is “2445 W Chapman Ave # 200” in Orange). According to one source, PEG has a staff of one. It is, according to another source, "FTB suspended" (i.e., it is suspended by the tax board for failure to meet tax requirements).
     Evidently, Lajevardi, a consistent donor to the Republican Party, was a co-founder, in the early 80s, of the International Education Corporation, the latter being the owner (I think) of UEI (see), but Lajevardi is no longer affiliated with it or UEI. (At any rate, his name cannot be found on IEC's website.)
     Further, Lajevardi is associated with the now apparently defunct MyAmericanEnglish.com. I think it was some kind of software available online. No longer.
     Mr. Lajevardi is also the CEO of something called 24-7 Classroom (see Catalog), another dodgy-and/or-defunct for-profit, this time located on 4th Street in Santa Ana. It specializes (specialized?) in ESL, business, and nursing. (Bill Vega, this time, is listed as President.) Its school performance fact sheet suggests that it has precious few students, a handful at most. (24-7 Classroom is not to be confused with Classroom 24-7, which seems viable.)
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Come to Jesus

Trump team, RNC to meet at pivotal moment (Politico)
Struggling campaign requests Orlando sit-down to fix the relationship and plot a turnaround.

     Donald Trump’s campaign and top Republican Party officials plan what one person called a “come to Jesus” meeting on Friday in Orlando to discuss the Republican nominee’s struggling campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the scheduled sit-down.
     Though a campaign source dismissed it as a "typical" gathering, others described it as a more serious meeting, with one calling it an "emergency meeting." It comes at a time of mounting tension between the campaign and the Republican National Committee, which is facing pressure to pull the plug on Trump’s campaign and redirect party funds down ballot to protect congressional majorities endangered by Trump’s candidacy....

Act like everything's fine

Clinton Embraces Endorsement of John Negroponte
(Democracy Now)

"Death squad" guy

     Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has embraced her recent endorsement by John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence. The President George W. Bush official also served as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, which was the staging ground for the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua. Hillary Clinton has faced questions on the campaign trail about her own role in Honduras as secretary of state, including legitimizing the 2009 coup in Honduras.

Did Hillary’s Top Aide Help Cover Up Her Private Server?
(Daily Beast)

Cheryl Mills, chief of staff

     The top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was told in late 2012 that a non-profit watchdog group had requested information about Clinton’s email, including the number of accounts she used, according to documents released Wednesday.
     The aide, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and other Clinton advisers knew at the time that the secretary was using a private email system to conduct official business. But despite the information request, the State Department told the group that it had found no “responsive” records.
     “This is evidence that Cheryl Mills covered up Hillary Clinton’s email system,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that sued for information about that original 2012 request, said in a statement. “She was aware of the [Freedom of Information Act] request about Clinton’s email accounts and allowed a response to go out that was a plain lie. And you can bet if Cheryl Mills knew about this inquiry, then Hillary Clinton did, too.”…

Is Brand New Congress the Future of Progressive Politics?
(The Nation)

     The goal is audacious: harness the enthusiasm and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders campaign to elect an entirely new Congress committed to the same platform.

Trump’s birtherism is now Republican gospel: 72 percent of GOP voters still doubt President Obama’s citizenship
(Salon)

     While Trump was making his latest outrageous statement at a rally in Florida Wednesday evening, NBC News released a very revealing — albeit rather apparent — poll finding that seems to have been underreported.
     72 percent of registered Republican voters still hold doubts about the President’s citizenship, even as his second term in office enters its final months.

Abedin, State Dept

Progressives Urge Clinton Not to Appoint a Wall Street Cabinet
(Truthdig)

     …Earlier this year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a report which found that Washington’s revolving-door system is part of what allows corporate crime to run rampant.
     The groups include advocacy organizations Public Citizen, MoveOn.org, and RootsAction.org, as well as the union Communications Workers of America (CWA), which in December endorsed Clinton’s then-rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president. Ending economic inequality became a well-known cornerstone of Sanders’ campaign….

Clinton Campaign & Foundation Facing Questions over State Dept. Emails
(Democracy Now)

Chagoury and pal

     The Clinton campaign is continuing to face questions following the release of 44 State Department emails showing close ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Clinton’s time as secretary of state. The emails include communications between top members of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s top State Department advisers, including Huma Abedin and lawyer Cheryl Mills. One of the communications was about billionaire Nigerian-based developer Gilbert Chagoury, who had contributed between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. The emails show a top Clinton Foundation executive writing to Abedin and Mills asking for help putting Chagoury in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. Abedin responded, "I’ll talk to jeff," referring to then-U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman. On Wednesday, Chagoury’s spokesperson said Chagoury "was simply passing along his observations and insights about the dire political situation in Lebanon at the time."

Olympic Pseudoscience

Cupping – Olympic Pseudoscience
By Steven Novella
From Science Based Medicine

   …Let me start with what I believe to be the definitive review: a review of systematic reviews by Edzard Ernst, which concludes:

In conclusion, this overview of SRs [systematic reviews] suggests that cupping may be effective for reducing pain. The evidence is insufficient for other indications. All SRs are based on primary studies with a high risk of bias. Therefore, considerable uncertainty remains about the therapeutic value of cupping.

     His review, and my reading of the published research, are very consistent with the typical pattern of biased research into a treatment that does not work. We see lots of small and poor quality studies, the kinds that are almost guaranteed to generate false positive results.
     The higher quality studies tend to be negative. There may be a residue of positive studies dealing with subjective symptoms, because those are the hardest to control for rigorously. We never see an objective positive outcome.
     Further, positive results tend to cluster within highly biased research groups. Ernst points out that most of the positive studies and reviews on cupping come from China. There is good reason to suspect overwhelming bias in such studies, and previous reviews have shown, for example, that 100% of acupuncture studies published in China were positive. Such uniformly positive results are statistically impossible without systematic bias….

Two evils

Emails Renew Questions About Clinton Foundation and State Dept. Overlap
(NYT)

WASHINGTON — A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
     The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.
     In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
     In another email, the foundation appeared to push aides to Mrs. Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request….

Trump: 'Second Amendment people' could deal with Clinton
(CNN)

   Wilmington, North Carolina (CNN)Donald Trump set off a fierce new controversy Tuesday with remarks about the right to bear arms that were interpreted by many as a threat of violence against Hillary Clinton.
     "Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know," Trump said....

Part of the problem

The great Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?) on Hillary Clinton: "The Democrats are part of the problem." She is "a true believer in neoliberalism."

• Donors for Bush, Kasich and Christie Are Turning to Clinton More Than to Trump
(NYT)

     People who donated to establishment Republican candidates in the primary season are more likely to give money to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, than to their own party’s candidate, Donald J. Trump....

• UCI's Peter Navarro Brings Steely Resolve Regarding China to Trump Campaign
(OC Weekly)

     Peter Navarro got heat nationally with the 2011 book the controversial UC Irvine economics professor co-authored with Greg Autry titled Death by China: Confronting the Dragon which, among other things, praised American steel-maker Nucor Corp. for standing up to Washington’s free trade lobby....

• Wikileaks Reveals Mainstream Media’s Coziness With Clinton
(The Observer)

     …The July Wikileaks release of nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails validated the concerns of Bernie Sanders supporters that the DNC helped rig the primary election for Clinton. These emails provided a glimpse into how the DNC and the mainstream media work together in providing public relations support for the Democratic establishment.
     Rather than informing voters to enrich democracy, the mainstream media has developed a feedback loop between support for particular candidates and the political agenda they intend to support. The freedom of the press is necessary for a democracy to function. This freedom was subverted by the DNC at the consent of the mainstream media outlets. Instead of remaining autonomous, they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the DNC to back Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee….

• Positive link between video games and academic performance, study suggests
(The Guardian UK)

     Children who play online video games tend to do better in academic science, maths and reading tests, according to an analysis of data from over 12,000 high school students in Australia.
. . .
     The cause of the association between game playing and academic success is not clear from the research….
     [Alberto Posso, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] also looked at the correlation between social media use and Pisa scores. He concluded that users of sites such as Facebook and Twitter were more likely to score 4% lower on average, and the more frequent the social networking usage, the bigger the difference. 78% of the teenagers said they used social networks every day.
     Other studies have found a link between heavy users of social networking and a low attention span, which is also linked to poorer academic performance, but the evidence is less than conclusive….

• Thomas Frank: What's the Matter with the Democrats?
(YouTube)

"This guy [Trump] is Huey Long without the compassion."

• Hillary Clinton’s Embrace of Kissinger Is Inexcusable
(The Nation)

     …Kissinger is a unique monster. He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor. As Richard Nixon’s aide-de-camp, Kissinger helped plan and execute a murderous, illegal foreign policy—in Southeast and South Asia, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—as reckless and immoral as anything Trump now portends. Millions died as a result of his actions. Kissinger and Nixon threatened to use nuclear weapons, and, indeed, Kissinger helped inscribe the threat of “limited nuclear war” into doctrine. Kissinger, in the 1970s, not only dug the hole that the greater Middle East finds itself in, but, as an influential cheerleader for both the first Gulf War in 1991 and its 2003 sequel, helped drive the United States into that ditch….