Orange County Primary Turnout Highest in 16 Years (Voice of OC)

Garnishing Social Security benefits of oldsters

Why the AARP is worried about student loans
(Politico)
The powerhouse lobby has its eye on a growing drag on old-age savings.

     As student loan debt has ballooned over the past two decades, the issue has moved from the sidelines of wonky policy debates into a full-fledged campaign issue, with even presidential candidates playing to the economic anxieties of parents and recent college grads. In the latest sign of just how far-reaching student loan debt has become, the issue is now on the radar of another, perhaps more surprising group: AARP.
     Over the past several years, the nation’s leading senior lobby has become increasingly involved in student-loan issues, pressuring the federal government to stop garnishing the Social Security benefits of older borrowers who defaulted on their loans. And in some state capitals the group is taking on the student loan industry, pushing for more regulations to police abusive loan-collection practices.
     A retirement organization may seem like an unlikely force for reform of student debt. But AARP’s involvement underscores just how long a shadow student loans are increasingly casting over Americans’ economic lives—a shadow that stretches all the way into their retirement. Remarkably, Americans over 60 years old are the fastest-growing category of student loan borrowers, having roughly quadrupled in number between 2005 and 2015, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Although older borrowers still account for just a sliver of the more than $1.5 trillion in total outstanding student loan debt, they’re more likely than younger borrowers to be behind on payments. Most are repaying debt they took out to help finance the education of their children or grandchildren, though some are still paying off their own tuition.
     “We consider it a looming threat,” said Lori Trawinski, director of banking and finance at the AARP Public Policy Institute. A central concern, she said, is how student debt—for themselves and their children—can delay key financial milestones like home ownership and chip away at retirement savings....

$5 million to Chapman University from billionaire Charles Koch sparks an uproar
(OC Register)

     A Nobel laureate decries the “hate speech.” The university president accuses faculty critics of seeking to stifle academic freedom. Professors tar each other as “disingenuous,” spreading “baseless lies and accusations.”
     The normally tranquil Orange County campus of Chapman University is in the throes of a bitter controversy — all due to a $5 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation.
     The gift from the conservative billionaire helps fund a program in “Humanomics,” which the university defines as “reintegrating the study of the humanities and economics.”
     The question at hand: Are political strings attached to the money?
     “No other donor would be allowed to pre-select professors based on their ideology,” said Tom Zoellner, an English professor. “Appointments were hustled through without due process or necessary transparency.”
     Last fall, the English department voted to reject two candidates for tenured professorships partly funded by the Koch donation. The two literature scholars were later hired by the business school for the interdisciplinary program, but only after the head of an economics hiring committee resigned in protest, citing “a lack of objectivity.”
. . .
     Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, the Kansas-based oil and chemicals conglomerate, and his brother David are ranked by Forbes as the 8th richest people in the world, with a net worth of $60 billion each.
     The brothers are best known for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect conservative Republicans to public office, and to dispute the impact of fossil fuels on the global climate.
. . .
     Protests have erupted over Koch donations at public universities such as Florida State, Montana State, Arizona State, George Mason University, the University of Utah, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, the University of Arizona, and Western Carolina University.
     But private institutions are also vulnerable to government funding cuts and eager for Koch support. Faculty and students at Wellesley College, Wake Forest University and Catholic University have pushed back against the foundation’s gifts, claiming it seeks to exercise ideological influence on faculty hiring.
. . .
     In April, a student lawsuit forced the disclosure of confidential agreements between the foundation and Virginia’s George Mason, the recipient of some $50 million in Koch gifts. The documents show Koch officials exercised a say in the hiring and performance reviews of the professors who benefited from the donations.
. . .
     The money, disbursed over five years, will help pay to hire 11 professors, five post-doctoral fellows, visiting academics and conferences. They are to include scholars in economics, politics, philosophy and literature.
. . .
     And not all the hiring for the Smith Institute has been rocky. The philosophy department, without incident, brought on Bas van der Vossen from the University of North Carolina, a specialist in political philosophy and ethics, and co-author of the 2017 “Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism.”
     “I hold libertarian ideas,” van der Vossen wrote in a Panther op-ed. “I believe that market economies generally make people better off, rich and poor. But… I am a philosopher first, and a philosopher’s job is to seek the truth, following the arguments wherever they might lead.”
     Students seem divided over whether the Koch donation matters....

Irvine Mayor Don Wagner and his good pal Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Irvine Mayor Don Wagner and his good pal Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Two peas in a pod?

Montana, one hundred years ago: "decisions which are honest and right"

     I've been busy researching a family that lived in Central Montana at the turn of the (last) century. 

     Above is a great ad I found in the Fergus County Democrat (July 4, 1911).*

     Here are excerpts from the Fergus County Argus** (October 5 & 10, 1904):

The "reasons why [the farmer] believes in and trusts Republicans."

"The best talkers in the country to speak in Lewistown."

     The Jennis are the family I'm researching. One of them mentioned here, Fred, is my friend Kathie Jenni's great-grandfather. As we can see, Fred served as an "elections judge" in the "Brass" precinct (of Fergus County), along with Mike Brass and John Jenni, Fred's cousin(?). Interesting people.

     The Argus was, of course, the Republican newspaper of the area. The attractions of the GOP cited here are interesting (i.e., quaint, ironic, curious, etc.).

     Here's what Lewistown, MT, Kathie's home town, looked like back then (the photos & captions are from an old timer who has a Central Montana historical blog):

*From Library of Congress:

   Fergus County Democrat

    In 1904, Tom Stout and Harry J. Kelly established one of the state's most progressive weeklies, the Fergus County Democrat, in Lewistown, Montana. Stout's political activism found an avenue for expression in his 1910 election to the state legislature and his 1912 election to the U.S. Congress. The six-column, eight-page weekly covered both state and national politics thoroughly. … The newspaper paid close attention to the presidential bid of Populist William Jennings Bryan. The editors did not miss an opportunity to berate the competition, the Fergus County Argus.

**From Library of Congress:

   The Mineral Argus [Fergus County Argus]

    On August 9, 1883, John Morton Vrooman and Charles S. Fell launched the Mineral Argus in the bustling gold camp of Maiden, Montana, where it remained until August 1886 when they moved their presses to nearby Lewistown, the new seat of Fergus County, and changed its name to the Fergus County Argus. Fell sold his interest in the newspaper to Vrooman in 1889 when he moved to Bozeman. … Vrooman remained an agricultural booster and active Republican throughout his lengthy publishing career. In 1912, he sold his interest in the Fergus County Argus to Arthur T. Packard and established the Grass Range Review thirty miles east of Lewistown.
     …[I]n 1899 the Fergus County Argus became the first institution in the county to use electricity. With the move to Lewistown, the publishers adopted the following motto, to which they remained true: “Devoted to the Mineral, Agricultural, Stock and Wool Interests of the Great Judith Country.” … The newspaper faithfully documented the closing of the “open range” after the severe winter of 1886-87 when over 60 percent of Montana’s cattle herds succumbed to deep snow and subzero temperatures….

"A degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society"

The Profound Social Cost of American Exceptionalism
By Eduardo Porter (NYT)

…[A]s I write what will be the last column of my tenure, I can’t help but acknowledge how little purchase my writing has had on the substance of reality. In particular, it has had no discernible effect on what one might call America’s fundamental paradox.
     The United States is one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the history of humanity. And yet it accepts — proudly defends, even — a degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society.
. . .
     As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.
     Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.
. . .
     Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.
     And yet for all the ink spilled by so many excellent journalists … America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.
     As Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post, populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.
. . .
     I will be devoting the next few weeks to figuring out what to focus on next — chatting with my editors, as well as with the sources I have come to rely on for sober, authoritative thinking. The important question, however, remains: What kind of society does “America” mean?

Forty years ago... (part 2)

1978: NORTH CAMPUS opening delayed by rain

Tustin News, May 11, 1978

Classes finally started at Saddleback College NORTH on January 22, 1979
There had been much controversy over the choice of the site for the district's second campus.
To read about it, see The origins of our college district, Part 8: the twisty, unpredictable, curious and dubious episodes that led to the choice of the “north campus” site (part A) AND The origins of our college district, Part 8b: twisty, unpredictable, curious and dubious, Part B

Stormy weather, early 1978

TAXATION ISSUES @ SADDLEBACK DISTRICT

Tustin News, May 18, 1978

Tustin News, May 25, 1978

See also: Forty years ago (part 1)