Why Is College So Expensive? Might Have Something To Do With The Huge Securities Bubble That’s Backed By Feds
April 26, 2011 No Comment“What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?” Why, I’m glad you asked that question! Turns out that education loan-backed derivatives are yet another investment bubble that helps drive up the cost of education — and We The People are already on the hook for reimbursement when they crash: Even with the Treasury no longer acting as co-signer on private loans, the flow of SLABS won’t end any time soon. What analysts at Barclay’s Capital wrote of the securities in 2006 still rings true: “For this sector, we expect sustainable growth in new issuance volume as the growth in education costs continues to outpace increases in family incomes, grants, and federal loans.” The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it. If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs . For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this opportunity. While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profits two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly amount of money on advertising, a fact that probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s notice. But despite the attention the for-profit sector has attracted (including congressional hearings), as in the housing crisis it’s hard to see where the bad apples stop and the barrel begins. For-profits have quickly tied themselves to traditional powers in education, politics, and media. Just a few examples: Richard C. Blum, University of California regent (and husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein), is also through his investment firm the majority stakeholder in two of the largest for-profit colleges. The Washington Post Co. owns Kaplan Higher Education, forcing the company’s flagship paper to print a steady stream of embarrassing parenthetical disclosures in articles on the subject of for-profits. Industry leader University of Phoenix has even developed an extensive partnership with GOOD magazine, sponsoring an education editor. Thanks to these connections, billions more in advertising, and nearly $9 million in combined lobbying and campaign contributions in 2010 alone, for-profits have become the fastest growing sector in American higher education. If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005. Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double, from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable. Unlike during the housing crisis, the government’s response to a national wave of defaults that could pop the higher-ed bubble is already written into law. In the event of foreclosure on a government-backed loan, the holder submits a request to what’s called a state guaranty agency, which then submits a claim to the feds. The federal disbursement rate is tied to the guaranty agency’s fiscal year default rate: for loans issued after October 1998, if the rate exceeds 5 percent, the disbursement drops to 85 percent of principal and interest accrued; if the rate exceeds 9 percent, the disbursement falls to 75 percent. But the guaranty agency rates are computed in such a way that they do not reflect the rate of default as students experience it; of all the guaranty agencies applying for federal reimbursement last year, none hit the 5 percent trigger rate. With all of these protections in place, SLABS are a better investment than most housing-backed securities ever were. The advantage of a preemptive bailout is that it can make itself unnecessary: if investors know they’re insulated from risk, there’s less reason for them to get skittish if the securities dip, and a much lower chance of a speculative collapse. The worst-case scenario seems to involve the federal government paying for students to go to college, and aside from the enrichment of the parasitic private lenders and speculators, this might not look too bad if you believe in big government, free education, or even Keynesian fiscal stimulus. But until now, we have only examined one side of the exchange. When students agree to take out a loan, the fairness of the deal is premised on the value for the student of their borrowed dollars. If an 18-year-old takes out $200,000 in loans, he or she better be not only getting the full value, but investing it well too. In other words, it might all be a lot cheaper if we just paid for education outright.
Continue reading …Why Is College So Expensive? Might Have Something To Do With The Huge Securities Bubble That’s Backed By Feds
April 26, 2011 No Comment“What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?” Why, I’m glad you asked that question! Turns out that education loan-backed derivatives are yet another investment bubble that helps drive up the cost of education — and We The People are already on the hook for reimbursement when they crash: Even with the Treasury no longer acting as co-signer on private loans, the flow of SLABS won’t end any time soon. What analysts at Barclay’s Capital wrote of the securities in 2006 still rings true: “For this sector, we expect sustainable growth in new issuance volume as the growth in education costs continues to outpace increases in family incomes, grants, and federal loans.” The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it. If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs . For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this opportunity. While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profits two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly amount of money on advertising, a fact that probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s notice. But despite the attention the for-profit sector has attracted (including congressional hearings), as in the housing crisis it’s hard to see where the bad apples stop and the barrel begins. For-profits have quickly tied themselves to traditional powers in education, politics, and media. Just a few examples: Richard C. Blum, University of California regent (and husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein), is also through his investment firm the majority stakeholder in two of the largest for-profit colleges. The Washington Post Co. owns Kaplan Higher Education, forcing the company’s flagship paper to print a steady stream of embarrassing parenthetical disclosures in articles on the subject of for-profits. Industry leader University of Phoenix has even developed an extensive partnership with GOOD magazine, sponsoring an education editor. Thanks to these connections, billions more in advertising, and nearly $9 million in combined lobbying and campaign contributions in 2010 alone, for-profits have become the fastest growing sector in American higher education. If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005. Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double, from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable. Unlike during the housing crisis, the government’s response to a national wave of defaults that could pop the higher-ed bubble is already written into law. In the event of foreclosure on a government-backed loan, the holder submits a request to what’s called a state guaranty agency, which then submits a claim to the feds. The federal disbursement rate is tied to the guaranty agency’s fiscal year default rate: for loans issued after October 1998, if the rate exceeds 5 percent, the disbursement drops to 85 percent of principal and interest accrued; if the rate exceeds 9 percent, the disbursement falls to 75 percent. But the guaranty agency rates are computed in such a way that they do not reflect the rate of default as students experience it; of all the guaranty agencies applying for federal reimbursement last year, none hit the 5 percent trigger rate. With all of these protections in place, SLABS are a better investment than most housing-backed securities ever were. The advantage of a preemptive bailout is that it can make itself unnecessary: if investors know they’re insulated from risk, there’s less reason for them to get skittish if the securities dip, and a much lower chance of a speculative collapse. The worst-case scenario seems to involve the federal government paying for students to go to college, and aside from the enrichment of the parasitic private lenders and speculators, this might not look too bad if you believe in big government, free education, or even Keynesian fiscal stimulus. But until now, we have only examined one side of the exchange. When students agree to take out a loan, the fairness of the deal is premised on the value for the student of their borrowed dollars. If an 18-year-old takes out $200,000 in loans, he or she better be not only getting the full value, but investing it well too. In other words, it might all be a lot cheaper if we just paid for education outright.
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Electoral body says it would not publish results of 19 seats in legislature after widespread claims of counting irregularities Haiti is facing further political disarray after fraud allegations forced authorities to delay certifying results from last month’s legislative election. The provisional electoral council said it would not publish 19 seats’ results following criticism from the UN, US, and the incoming president, Michel Martelly. Some Haitian politicians demanded a recount, others a fresh election. There were also calls for a travel ban on members of the electoral council, some of whom resigned over the row. The complaints centred on irregularities in the counting of votes in the runoff which seemed to favour the Unity party of the outgoing president, René Préval. The party was awarded 46 of 99 seats in the chamber of deputies and 17 of the senate’s 30 seats. “We have found no explanation for the reversals of 18 legislative races in the final results, which in all except two cases benefited the incumbent party,” the US embassy in Port-au-Prince said in a statement. “Without a public explanation and review … the legitimacy of seating these candidates is in question.” The embassy cited one case in which votes for one Unity candidate jumped from 90,000 in preliminary results to more than 145,000 in final results. Gaillot Dorsinvil, head of the electoral council, said the results of 19 seats in total would not be certified out of “transparency” but he did not mention a recount nor details of what may happen next. The row could delay Martelly’s scheduled inauguration on 14 May and planned constitutional reforms, which are supposed to be voted on by 9 May. Martelly, who won March’s presidential runoff, said he expected the problem would be resolved within weeks but called for an independent Haitian-led investigation into electoral processes. The carnival singer-turned politician, fresh from US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s backing on a trip to Washington, went to Miami to lobby Haiti’s diaspora for help in rebuilding the earthquake-shattered Caribbean country. “We need you to bring your skills and expertise back to Haiti,” he said. He proposed diverting 1% of wire transfers to Haiti, and a 5 cent a minute levy on phone calls, to an education fund to give 860,000 impoverished children free schooling. Even before the January 2010 quake, which destroyed many schools and killed numerous teachers, Haiti struggled to educate all its children. “Education is the future of Haiti,” said Martelly. Haiti United States Rory Carroll guardian.co.uk
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Information commissioner says legislation outlawing phone hacking should be clarified The information commissioner has told a powerful group of MPs that legislation outlawing phone hacking is “very uneven” and “very unclear” and the law should be clarified. Christopher Graham told the home affairs select committee that existing legislation outlawing the practice “was drawn up for another age and other circumstances”. The committee is investigating the legal framework surrounding phone hacking following revelations that the News of the World commissioned a private investigator to illegally intercept voicemail messages belonging to dozens of public figures. Since the committee began its inquiry the paper has apologised to eight victims who are suing its owner, News Group Newspapers, in the high court and offered to pay them compensation. The total bill is likely to run to many millions of pounds. The information commissioner pointed out he is not responsible for enforcing the legislation which outlaws phone hacking, including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but told MPs it needs to be updated. He said he was monitoring the dispute between the director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer and John Yates, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police. Starmer has contradicted Yates’s claim that Starmer originally advised the Met that no offence was committed unless a voicemail message is intercepted before it has been listened to by its intended recipient. Yates told the home affairs committee earlier this month that advice “permeated the entire investigation”. Graham said on Tuesday: “We are a very interested bystander because there is a lack of clarity about where the law stands.” The information commissioner added: “At the moment you’ve got a regulatory vacuum because there’s no equivalent of the information commissioner acting as a regulator giving advice and guidance.” Graham also said stiffer sentences should be imposed for illegally “blagging” information and revealed the Ministry of Justice is considering introducing measures that would allow judges to impose prison sentences of up to two years for the offence. The maximum sentence for obtaining confidential information such as medical records or phone numbers by calling a company or public body posing as someone else is currently a £5,000 fine. Graham told MPs that blagging was a multimillion pound industry and that custodial sentences are needed to clamp down on “a very profitable business”. Graham said “tens” of public figures who are suing the News of the World for invasion of privacy have written to his office to discover if they were the victims of “blagging”. He added that “less than a dozen” have obtained court orders requiring the commissioner to make available any information it has on whether they were victims of the practice. The Information Commissioner’s Office conducted an investigation called Operation Motorman in 2003 looking at Steve Whittamore, a private investigator who specialised in obtaining information from mobile phone companies, tax authorities and other public bodies, which resulted in his arrest and conviction. Some of the public figures suing the News of the World have asked it to provide relevant information from that inquiry. Graham also criticised mobile phone operators for failing to advise their customers on the measures they should take to ensure their phones and other devices are secure. He said he did not know whether mobile phone operators had written to their customers informing them they had been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was on the News of the World’s books until August 2006, when he was arrested for illegally intercepting voicemail messages. He said it was not his job to advise them on whether they should hand over that information and he hasn’t given them guidance about whether to do so. Yates claimed during evidence to MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee that the Met had asked mobile phone companies to warn customers who may have been targeted by Mulcaire. All four leading mobile phone companies have since denied they received such a request. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook . James Robinson guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Bernie Goldberg supports Wikileaks, calls it a news organization — over Bill O’Reilly’s objections
April 26, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media There was another massive release of more Wikileaks documents and cries rang out by Village elitists and the Obama administration condemning them . The Obama administration is condemning the latest release of classified documents by WikiLeaks that provide new details about detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. More than 700 documents were made public Monday that detail sensitive information about the status of, evidence against and treatment of some of the 172 prisoners still housed at the detention facility in Cuba. The government said that the leak, published by news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times , could impede its anti-terrorism efforts. It defended its conduct in handling the prisoners… read on Any person that believes in the basic concept of journalism should be supporting the legality of these releases. Don’t look for that from the Beltway elites, though. Greg Mitchell has been doing an excellent job of covering WikiLeaks and is the go-to place for anything related to them: As I’ve done for five months, I will be updating news and views on all things WikiLeaks all day, with new items added at the top. — 10:50 Strong NYT editorial tonight: “The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released….The disaster at Guantánamo Bay is now Mr. Obama’s problem. He should not compound Mr. Bush’s mistakes in his efforts to correct them.” 7:45 The Gitmo Files: Center for Constitional Rights analysis, video. 5:05 Amazing: The Atlantic does the counting and finds that the NYT (tho often critical of Assange) has cited WikiLeaks docs in more than half of daily editions this year — and that’s not counting brief references to Assange or Manning but only actual use of documents. Would probably be even higher percentage going back to last Thanksgiving when Cable gate broke. 4:25 Bombshell from the Guardian : Al-qaeda terrorist / bomber also worked for Brit spy service M-16 . ” Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili , an Algerian citizen described as a “facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida”, was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay. “But according to Hamlili’s Guantánamo “assessment” file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the Guardian , US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence.”… read on Which leads me to Bernie Goldberg , who’s book has had a very negative impact on right wing extremists. He’s a useful tool for Fox News because he’s their resident expert on “librul bias” in the media, but since he did work for CBS in the news department, he does understand how vital it is for journalists to use leaked information so that they can do their jobs when it comes to the government. Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a lesson from history on why they are so important. Anyway, Bill O’Reilly wants Wikileaks tried for treason (as you’d expect), but Goldberg sets him straight about their value and echoes what progressives have been saying about WikiLeaks. As long as they received them without participating in their retrieval if it was done illegally, then they are obligated to release them to the public. O’Reilly: This is an ongoing situation. Some of the press is seizing upon it. If I got leaked Wikileaks documents I wouldn’t put them on the air. I’m gonna tell everyone I wouldn’t flat out do it. Especially if it put the ISA in any kind of a dangerous situation, which the Guantanamo Bay thing can whip up people easily around the world Goldberg: I think we disagree . Certainly I’m against it if it put lives in jeopardy or jeopardizes an ongoing operation to capture terrorists then I’m against it, but I think you have to distinguish between the person who actually downloaded and in effect stole the documents. That person is clearly guilty of some crime and Wikileaks, if WIkileaks was not in collusion with that person who downloaded the documents. Wikileaks didn’t give them software to do it or didn’t tell them how to do it in any way, then Wikileaks is pretty much a news organization. Granted it’s an anti-American, anti war organization, but they got the information from whoever stole the documents and then made a decision as to whether or not to publish. I think they have a right to do that. I don’t think they should be prosecuted Bernie called Wikileaks a news organization and rightly so. O’Reilly tries to say the government can make some sort of Rico case against Wikileaks and says this. O’Reilly: You can get them on that Rico thing. Now, is Sweden going to expedite over here? I don’t know whether they will or they’re not. I think you can make a strong case that these people are practicing espionage against this country . Bernie actually lends the voice of reason to The Factor and explains the Pentagon Papers to Bill. O’Reilly, unsurprisingly, refuses to listen.
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The Woman Warrior’s author talks about changing times in China, turning to poetry ‘to hasten the pace of creation’ and getting arrested with Alice Walker Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir of growing up in California as the daughter of illegal Chinese immigrants was greeted rapturously when first published in the 1970s. “A poem turned into a sword” was the New York Times’s verdict, while one critic compared her to James Joyce. The Woman Warrior blended its author’s childhood memories with the stories told by her parents, and delivered an invigorating dose of mythology, revolutionary politics and martial arts to a western audience that would wait another decade before films by Zhang Yimou and Chen Caige brought Chinese culture to more general notice. Meeting Hong Kingston now, as she stops off in London to talk about her new book I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, en route to a conference on her work in Switzerland, it all feels a very long time ago. Although very few writers from China and the Chinese diaspora are widely read in English, the subject matter has lost its strangeness. Returning to The Woman Warrior, what is striking is that so much of what it describes has become familiar from other sources, from the gruelling apprenticeship served by the swordswoman, fighting dragons and phantoms in the mountains, to horrible scenes of female infanticide, foot binding, and the stoning to death during wartime of a suspected traitor. In the new book, Kingston returns to China and her parents’ villages. “Twenty years ago it took a day-and-a-half,” she says, “two years ago it took four hours on the superhighway. And they do have televisions and cellphones and water and electricity but my cousin was still farming with water-buffalo. I could see that any moment now they’ll probably sell the water-buffalo and mechanise …” Having spent a decade each on two previous books, Kingston was keen to up her own pace, and says she wrote this one in verse “to hasten the pace of creation. Because poetry is condensed I don’t have to make my way right over to the right margin, I don’t have to leap around in time and space, and I can say a lot with fewer words if I can just find the right words.” The book’s wide margins gave the book its title, and while its short lines adhere to no particular meter they give the story a shape that some critics have referred to as epic – “but I don’t think it’s epic, the idea of epic is so large and we think of the epic poem as a war story and I think this is more intimate than that”. Rather than Homer, Kingston says she was channelling Walt Whitman – “I embed his words into mine so I can sing along with him” – and was influenced by her own father’s poems. She includes a translation of one of these and says her next project will be to translate the rest and publish them with examples of his calligraphy – “but maybe I won’t even be able to get it published, this will not be so commercial”. I Love a Broad Margin blurs the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, combining sections of reportage including a lengthy description of her arrest at an anti-war demonstration outside the White House alongside Alice Walker in 2003, with fantasy characters such as the male alter ego she also describes as her avatar, Wittman Ah Sing. “If I were a man that’s the man I would be. He’s also my imaginary friend, the way I had when I was a child, and then I brought him back in this new book because he’s like Beatrice taking Dante through the underworld. So he accompanies me to these places in the middle of nowhere where a woman can’t go, and then at a certain point I have to go on alone because we face our mortality alone. I picture him as quite tall with a beard,” she says. “He’s one of these old hippies you see around, sort of balding on top but they still have the pigtail at the back.” Kingston talks like one of these old hippies herself. Of the “Code Pink” women’s march against the Iraq war that saw her arrested and briefly imprisoned, she says “it was the most truly peaceful demonstration I have ever participated in, real non-violence, palpable feelings of love. I could feel love between me and the next woman and the next and I swear the air turned pink, so warm and happy, and the feeling of community, I mean everyone, and we had the most peaceful gentle arrest.” Her account of this dramatic day is not without humour. ‘”My wife is gonna kill me,” said a black cop; “I’m arresting Alice Walker.”‘ Later, in the cells, Walker helps her out: “I spoke, asked her/ to undo my handcuffs, and if they/ won’t untie, to help me unbutton and lower/ my pants, I had to pee. She got them off.” But there is also something self-aggrandising about the whole thing, which sits badly with references to Iraq itself: “The oasis that gives you/ haven is Basra, the air station and naval/ base. Basra, home of Sinbad the Sailor,/ and before that, the Garden of Eden./ Please stand on a roadside, and hold/ the Bell of Peace”. A feminist from her student days at Berkeley, Kingston left California for Hawaii with her American husband in the late 60s, so repelled were they by the violence of the anti-war movement. Since then she has largely stuck to her pacifist beliefs, giving writing seminars to war veterans to “help them think about what they’re doing, what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in their conscience” – though she quickly adds that she’s not out to brainwash anyone. Now 70, Kingston is a tiny, beautiful person, with an extravagant mane of white hair and a sweet voice. “I think I was 16 when I was getting my first white hairs,” she says proudly. “I’ve met a young woman with white hair like mine and she turns out to come from the village my mother comes from.” Amazed by The Woman Warrior in my 20s, and disappointed by the new book, I was wary of our meeting, fearing silence and embarrassment. But Kingston’s sincerity is apparent and disarming. Even as I gasped inwardly at her comparing herself to Shakespeare and Jane Austen (“I’ve written 6 books./ Hers are 6 big ones, mine/ 4 big ones and 2 small ones.”) I was interested by what she was saying. Recently she has been following the example of Colette, who took up needlepoint in her 80s when she gave up writing. “When I finished this book I knitted some scarves and tea cosies. It was so much fun figuring out where to put the openings for the spout and handle!” But her memoir includes much darker reflections on ageing. Near the end is a list of people important to her who have died. Typically, this is partly name-dropping: Grace Paley and Eartha Kitt both feature. But then she begins a list of reasons to go on living, “1. Kill myself, and I set a bad example/ to children and everyone who knows me.” Has she thought about killing herself? “Yes I do get suicidal,” she replies, “yes, yes, and depressed, maybe melancholy and where I could feel romantic about dying.” Later she qualifies this, suggesting she was thinking of friends rather than herself, “but when someone I love dies, I do want to go with them and I have to work against that. And one way is to say OK, I am going to make a list of reasons to stay. Then I wrote about seven reasons and when I read it later I thought it looked like a to-do list and then it came to me: as long as you have a to-do list you have to keep living.” Fiction Poetry Susanna Rustin guardian.co.uk
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The Woman Warrior’s author talks about changing times in China, turning to poetry ‘to hasten the pace of creation’ and getting arrested with Alice Walker Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir of growing up in California as the daughter of illegal Chinese immigrants was greeted rapturously when first published in the 1970s. “A poem turned into a sword” was the New York Times’s verdict, while one critic compared her to James Joyce. The Woman Warrior blended its author’s childhood memories with the stories told by her parents, and delivered an invigorating dose of mythology, revolutionary politics and martial arts to a western audience that would wait another decade before films by Zhang Yimou and Chen Caige brought Chinese culture to more general notice. Meeting Hong Kingston now, as she stops off in London to talk about her new book I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, en route to a conference on her work in Switzerland, it all feels a very long time ago. Although very few writers from China and the Chinese diaspora are widely read in English, the subject matter has lost its strangeness. Returning to The Woman Warrior, what is striking is that so much of what it describes has become familiar from other sources, from the gruelling apprenticeship served by the swordswoman, fighting dragons and phantoms in the mountains, to horrible scenes of female infanticide, foot binding, and the stoning to death during wartime of a suspected traitor. In the new book, Kingston returns to China and her parents’ villages. “Twenty years ago it took a day-and-a-half,” she says, “two years ago it took four hours on the superhighway. And they do have televisions and cellphones and water and electricity but my cousin was still farming with water-buffalo. I could see that any moment now they’ll probably sell the water-buffalo and mechanise …” Having spent a decade each on two previous books, Kingston was keen to up her own pace, and says she wrote this one in verse “to hasten the pace of creation. Because poetry is condensed I don’t have to make my way right over to the right margin, I don’t have to leap around in time and space, and I can say a lot with fewer words if I can just find the right words.” The book’s wide margins gave the book its title, and while its short lines adhere to no particular meter they give the story a shape that some critics have referred to as epic – “but I don’t think it’s epic, the idea of epic is so large and we think of the epic poem as a war story and I think this is more intimate than that”. Rather than Homer, Kingston says she was channelling Walt Whitman – “I embed his words into mine so I can sing along with him” – and was influenced by her own father’s poems. She includes a translation of one of these and says her next project will be to translate the rest and publish them with examples of his calligraphy – “but maybe I won’t even be able to get it published, this will not be so commercial”. I Love a Broad Margin blurs the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, combining sections of reportage including a lengthy description of her arrest at an anti-war demonstration outside the White House alongside Alice Walker in 2003, with fantasy characters such as the male alter ego she also describes as her avatar, Wittman Ah Sing. “If I were a man that’s the man I would be. He’s also my imaginary friend, the way I had when I was a child, and then I brought him back in this new book because he’s like Beatrice taking Dante through the underworld. So he accompanies me to these places in the middle of nowhere where a woman can’t go, and then at a certain point I have to go on alone because we face our mortality alone. I picture him as quite tall with a beard,” she says. “He’s one of these old hippies you see around, sort of balding on top but they still have the pigtail at the back.” Kingston talks like one of these old hippies herself. Of the “Code Pink” women’s march against the Iraq war that saw her arrested and briefly imprisoned, she says “it was the most truly peaceful demonstration I have ever participated in, real non-violence, palpable feelings of love. I could feel love between me and the next woman and the next and I swear the air turned pink, so warm and happy, and the feeling of community, I mean everyone, and we had the most peaceful gentle arrest.” Her account of this dramatic day is not without humour. ‘”My wife is gonna kill me,” said a black cop; “I’m arresting Alice Walker.”‘ Later, in the cells, Walker helps her out: “I spoke, asked her/ to undo my handcuffs, and if they/ won’t untie, to help me unbutton and lower/ my pants, I had to pee. She got them off.” But there is also something self-aggrandising about the whole thing, which sits badly with references to Iraq itself: “The oasis that gives you/ haven is Basra, the air station and naval/ base. Basra, home of Sinbad the Sailor,/ and before that, the Garden of Eden./ Please stand on a roadside, and hold/ the Bell of Peace”. A feminist from her student days at Berkeley, Kingston left California for Hawaii with her American husband in the late 60s, so repelled were they by the violence of the anti-war movement. Since then she has largely stuck to her pacifist beliefs, giving writing seminars to war veterans to “help them think about what they’re doing, what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in their conscience” – though she quickly adds that she’s not out to brainwash anyone. Now 70, Kingston is a tiny, beautiful person, with an extravagant mane of white hair and a sweet voice. “I think I was 16 when I was getting my first white hairs,” she says proudly. “I’ve met a young woman with white hair like mine and she turns out to come from the village my mother comes from.” Amazed by The Woman Warrior in my 20s, and disappointed by the new book, I was wary of our meeting, fearing silence and embarrassment. But Kingston’s sincerity is apparent and disarming. Even as I gasped inwardly at her comparing herself to Shakespeare and Jane Austen (“I’ve written 6 books./ Hers are 6 big ones, mine/ 4 big ones and 2 small ones.”) I was interested by what she was saying. Recently she has been following the example of Colette, who took up needlepoint in her 80s when she gave up writing. “When I finished this book I knitted some scarves and tea cosies. It was so much fun figuring out where to put the openings for the spout and handle!” But her memoir includes much darker reflections on ageing. Near the end is a list of people important to her who have died. Typically, this is partly name-dropping: Grace Paley and Eartha Kitt both feature. But then she begins a list of reasons to go on living, “1. Kill myself, and I set a bad example/ to children and everyone who knows me.” Has she thought about killing herself? “Yes I do get suicidal,” she replies, “yes, yes, and depressed, maybe melancholy and where I could feel romantic about dying.” Later she qualifies this, suggesting she was thinking of friends rather than herself, “but when someone I love dies, I do want to go with them and I have to work against that. And one way is to say OK, I am going to make a list of reasons to stay. Then I wrote about seven reasons and when I read it later I thought it looked like a to-do list and then it came to me: as long as you have a to-do list you have to keep living.” Fiction Poetry Susanna Rustin guardian.co.uk
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Even while battling cancer in a hospice, the former X-Ray Spex singer was talking about writing new songs and fighting cynicism. Here was a pop star who truly made a difference The internet is already melting with the warmth and love extended towards Poly Styrene, who died yesterday after a brave battle with breast cancer . As the singer with X-Ray Spex, her songs such as Germ Free Adolescents and The Day the World Turned Day-Glo were among the most memorable of the punk era. Born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, she was also a feminist and “misfit superstar” who paved the way for everyone from Kim Gordon to Karen O. Beth Ditto credits her with “shaping my identity” and her fans include Boy George and David Baddiel . But for generations of followers, the unassuming singer was more than an icon: she was someone who felt like one of us, and who will be mourned like an absent friend. When I was 13, she had a huge impact on me because as a small, ginger-haired kid struggling with identity she was the first pop star I could identify with. Mixed race, young and wearing bonkers outfits and dental braces, her simple but powerful message was that it was OK to be different because everyone is special. During the punk explosion, I owned just two punk albums: the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and X-Ray Spex’s Germ Free Adolescents – and I played the latter most. Poly taught me about subjects that school didn’t: identity crises, genetic engineering, and consumer society. Even today, those lyrics – and her wonderfully untamed phrasing – are burned into my brain: “I live off you, and you live off me, and the whole world lives off of everybody … see we’re gonna be exploited, by somebody, by somebody.” Back then, I could never have imagined that I’d end up interviewing her in a hospice as she battled breast cancer. Bed-bound after a fall broke her back in two places, she accepted the illness with incredible grace and I was struck not just by her bravery but also her humour. We spent much of the interview chuckling, beginning with her telling me she had once been taught by future Queen guitarist Brian May. “We used to heckle him. ‘Sir, are you married? If you are married, why doesn’t your wife iron your shirts?’” She explained that her distinctive worldview had been formed by a mix of seeing the Sex Pistols and living off the land for a summer before returning to London and finding “everything seemed to be made of plastic”. X-Ray Spex were about “not trying to be like anybody else, but being yourself. High energy, youthful music, creativity. Better than expressing yourself through crime. Being in a band, saying what you want. It was better than being in a girl gang.” She explained how, as punk turned from liberating force to straitjacket, she’d quit the band – after being pelted with tomatoes during a gig in Paris. “We’d tried to change our sound,” she explained. “They didn’t like that, the anarchists in their black leather jackets. They thought it was the French revolution all over again.” But she admitted to not realising the significance of what she had started: “I didn’t really think about it. I just went steaming ahead, like a bull in a China shop. I’m quite discerning about what I get behind, but when I really get behind something, I give it everything.” To the last, her optimism and energy never waned – and she was even talking of ideas for new songs coming to her in the hospice. Her new album, Generation Indigo , – uplifting, playfully opionated pop and her best music since the 70s – was “something really positive” she could leave behind, should the worst happen. Not that she feared it. “I try not to be negative or cynical,” she explained. “Even though we’re in a crazy situation, economically, and with wars, when things go far right, they will have to swing left. We have to become more caring and sharing. Generation Indigo are the people who will protest peacefully, and it’s happening already.” And then she smiled: the smile of a woman fighting a terrible personal situation, but thinking only of the world she had yet to leave behind. The smile of someone with no regrets, who had a lot of fun, and made a difference. Poly Styrene Punk Pop and rock Cancer Dave Simpson guardian.co.uk
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Number of applicants to UK universities is up only 2.1% this year, surprising those who thought there would be a rush before tuition fees soar The rapid increase in the number of young people applying to UK universities over the last five years appears to be tailing off, statistics show. Figures published today by the University and College Admissions Service (Ucas) reveal that the number of applicants – while at a record high – has only increased by 2.1% in the last year. Between 2007 and 2008, the number of applicants grew by 8.3%. A year later, the increase was 8.8%. Between 2009 and 2010, the growth was 15.3%. This autumn, 633,811 applicants hope to start full-time undergraduate degree courses, the figures reveal. Last year, 487,329 people were accepted on to courses, meaning that this summer, 146,482 could be rejected by all the universities to which they have applied. Many people expected there to be a rush of applicants this year, hoping to get on to courses before fees almost treble, as almost three-quarters of universities in England intend to charge £9,000 tuition fees from autumn 2012 – the maximum allowed. Ministers allowed universities to offer an extra 10,000 university places for last year and this. But in 2012, these places will not be available. This year’s figures show that degrees in history, philosophy and classics are less popular than they were last year, while places on physics, maths and engineering courses are more sought after. Applications for history and for philosophy are down by 1.5%, while those for linguistics or classics have fallen by 4.2%. Applications for European languages have dropped by 0.8%, but non-European languages have increased by the same amount. However, applications for maths and computer science have risen by 6.5%, while for engineering they have climbed by 4.7%. Nursing has grown by 14%. The proportion of university hopefuls who are older than 18 when they apply continues to rise. The proportion of 19-year-olds who applied this year has grown by 6.2% while those aged 24 has grown by 4%. • How much are universities planning to charge in 2012? Consult our datablog for the breakdown. Students Higher education Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Greta Van Susteren and Ken Cuccinelli Weep over SCOTUS Decision Not To Fast-Track HCR Lawsuits
April 26, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to fast track the Virginia challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which has Greta Van Susteren in a tizzy over those lazy Supreme Court justices who dare to take their three-month break while the health of America teeters in the balance. Ken Cuccinelli was happy to oblige her, jumping right in with his assessment that states will spend “millions before taxpayers even see a band-aid or any health care”, due to the cost of setting up exchanges in advance of implementation of the Affordable Care Act. If their estimate is correct and June 2012 would be the earliest a Supreme Court decision would be made on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, that throws it right into the middle of the 2012 general election, which could really be a political neutron bomb. If the Supreme Court decision were a 5-4 ruling it unconstitutional, for example, it could play right into the hands of conservatives who will then begin touting their market-based reforms, a la Ken Cuccinelli at the end of this clip. Maybe I’m just being cynical here, but I don’t see the decision to delay it as particularly good news. It feels just as political as a decision to fast-track it would have been, delaying the outcome until we’re right in the thick of the 2012 general election.
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