Rene Alexander Acosta (born January 16, 1969) is an American attorney, academic, and politician. Today, he serves as the 27th United States Secretary of Labor. He was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida between June 11, 2005 and June 5, 2009. During that time he committed to the most egregious sentencing deal in the history of American jurisprudence. Despite this with all the cringe inducing aspects to it, he maintains his position as Secretary of Labor.

As U.S. Attorney on an October morning in 2007, he had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz. Instead of meeting at his Miami headquarters. It is reported: “the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44,  . . .  the meeting was critical.” Why is Acosta holding a secret meeting?

Here we have a U.S. attorney meeting secretly with a lawyer who represented “Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, [who] was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.” Epstein is involved in raping many, many young girls

Harvard, a recipient of many gifts from Epstein, has been asked about them: “Former University President Derek C. Bok, then serving as Harvard’s interim president, stood by his longstanding assertion that the University should not “have an obligation to investigate each donor and impose detailed moral standards.” University spokespeople said in 2006 that Harvard had no plans to return any money it had received from Epstein.” I suppose it won’t have any problems taking money from Mohammed bin Salman the Saudi Arabian butcher.  

I assume when you have the type of money that Jeffrey Epstein had there are very many who bow and scrape looking for scraps from his table. Harvard has received a gift from the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation of 30 million dollars to study the evolution of molecular biology. It is said the Foundation gives out 200 million dollars in gifts every year to scientists. The Foundation “has helped fund NeuroTV, the largest online network devoted to academic interviews on everything neuroscience.”  Through his generosity and Foundation Epstein has done much good and built many contacts. He has been a member of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations.

The problem Joe Biden has is his civil rights record is wonderful on matters that did not affect his constituents or his chance to hold his senate seat. When they did he showed a different face. When his white constituents spoke out in opposition to the busing of black and white kids he fell in line with what many other elected politicians did. He opposed the idea of busing.

Kamala Harris who had been bused in her home city pointed this out. From her planned sneak attack on Joe – (Biden likes to be called Joe – not because he drinks a lot of Joe – but because he thinks it is folksier so on Twitter he refers to his helpers as Team Joe) – indicating that had he had his way she would not have been bused and thus propelled on a successful career. This appealed to many as Harris’s standing rose and Joe’s fell.

(continued from yesterday)

Biden’s professed concern for blacks being subject to busing because “black parents were terrified that their children would be targets of violence in suburban schools” was facile. Blacks were clamoring to go to the better schools in the suburbs as shown by Boston’s METCO program that never could satisfy the demands of all the blacks who sought entry into it.  So it is given lie to by the case of Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), a case that did more to destroy the effectiveness of busing than all the Southern segregationists and northern weak kneed politicians. MIlliken decided that federal courts did not have the authority to impose their desegregation plans outside of the city in which the Constitutional violation occurred. In other words, Judge Garrity could not bring in Brookline (which is almost surrounded by Boston), Newton and other suburban school systems to help desegregate the Boston public schools.

I noted earlier that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts having already admitted black students received an inferior education to whites; and that it was already using some suburbs to address the problem; that it could have been argued that it was an exception to Millilken. After all cities and towns are subdivisions of a state whose borders can be altered by the state. Why then couldn’t the borders of school districts likewise be changed.

(continued from Friday)

How does busing stand now that the issue has arisen again during the Democratic debate. Harris when she first went into her attack setting up Biden reminded me of someone saying “I know you don’t beat your wife but when did you stop doing it.”  She said that “I know you’re not a racist” but then accused him of being one by being against busing. She did this based on her assumption that to be against busing black and white kids to and fro is racist because she as a black girl was bused and benefited from it. Does it follow that every black girl who was bused was better off because of it? Does it follow that had she not been bused she would not have managed to achieve the same results?

(continued from Wednesday)

Kamala Harris’s busing was instituted by the City of Berkeley. Prior to that happening there were many community meetings and protests. The plan was to bus black children to schools in predominately white neighborhoods. Berkeley also bused  white kids to predominately black schools. It took a different approach than Boston. It made schools in the white neighborhoods K to 3 and those in the black neighborhoods 4 to 6.

It worked for a while but with ensuing population shifts and some “white flight” integration became more difficult. “By the early 1980s, 7 out of 12 elementary schools were racially imbalanced with African-Americans constituting over 53% of total enrollment at four of these schools.” In 1994 – over 25 years after the busing plan was put in place – “the Berkeley School Board voted to phase out the 1968 plan and replace it with a new plan that still fostered integration and used buses but also allowed for family choice.” That plan too was revised in 2004 and remains in effect today.

(continued from yesterday)

After Hale and Dorr packed up its bags an withdrew from the case, it then fell into the lap of my firm. By that time Garrity had already begun busing students here, there and everywhere under the Board plan but what was on paper turned out to be very helter-skelter when implemented.

Garrity wanted a better plan. This would be the Phase 2 plan. The first big event was the hearing before the four masters appointed by Garrity to listen to the different plans that had been offered by various parties most of which involved busing. The masters aided by two independent “experts” were charged with recommending one to the judge. I handled the case for the Committee that lasted about two weeks. At least a half a dozen lawyers were representing other. parties.

The Committee offered a plan that involved establishing small magnet schools in neutral areas that would be racially balanced. They would be so good that most parents interested in their child’s education would be attracted to them even though they may contain kids of another race. That was given short shrift. For one reason, the Committee had become the bête noire of the judge,  and the other, the idea of forcing people to do things they’d prefer not to do seemed to have an inordinate appeal to some.

(continued from yesterday)

White opposition to busing could not be posited as the reason for being Biden being against it. It was better to hide it in gobbledygook such as “mechanical problems” or other ways.

Biden pursuing this stratagem added: “I have argued that the least effective remedy to be imposed is the busing remedy”  In addition he said: “I come down on the side of A, [busing] is not constitutionally required and B, [busing] is not a useful tool. 

His spokesperson tried to explain after the debate. According to the above cited article he said: “[Joe Biden] has also always been an advocate for integration, but saw that the forced busing being discussed in these statements was not the right mechanism for achieving integration in Delaware because it put an undue burden on African-American families and children.” I suppose one had to live in a bag to believe Biden’s concern was the black children when it was the parents of those children and their fellow black representatives who were seeking the busing remedy.