Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/27/boola-boola-moola-moola.html
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Well that doesn’t sound like it can’t be wrong.
William Singer could have decided to charge more to a Chinese family based on some underlying bias.
That doesn’t mean they (briber and bribee) still weren’t up to criminal behavior.
was preying on naive, super-rich Chinese people
And I’m sorry, but if a person is naive with a 1.2 million dollar payment, then they are aggressively and wilfully naive. Too rich to care about a million dollars pretty much indicates that a person shouldn’t be controlling a million dollars in the first place.
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For that much money you can hire private tutors 24/7 and give your kid a real education.
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“Sure, I lied and bribed people to get my kid into Yale, but (sob) I was over-charged. I’m the real victim here!”
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They shoulda went for a budget school, like USC. /s
Course they’d be a shoo-in at Trump University. “It wasn’t a bribe, but if it was a bribe I was overcharged!”
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There probably was racist over-charging.
If people rob a bank together, it’s not crazy to think that prejudiced co-conspirators would stiff their non-white colleagues on the take.
But they still robbed a bank together.
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Right, because bribery is so alien to Chinese culture that they could not imagine such a thing being possible.
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I’ll check back in when I find my sympathy for the poor, exploited kleptocrat class. I must’ve left it around here somewhere.
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There is a shocking amount of anti-Chinese (and anti-Asian) bias in Ivy League admissions practice. Not sure the amount of the bribe for an unqualified kid is very useful evidence of it.
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Maybe the argument goes that because bribery is standard practice in China, Singer exploited their ignorance that it isn’t here.
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MR. GUO: Singer, this bribe of yours is terrible!
WILLIAM SINGER: I’m sorry you feel that way Mr. Guo, your daughter did get into Yale. Is there anything else?
MR. GUO: Yes! You’ve overcharged me because I’m Asian. I paid twice what Lori Loughlin did and I’m getting half the service. I demand to be arrested and charged right away!
Edited to correct the name of the bribery facilitator
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In a better world, people would react to this story by thinking:
“Oh, this William Singer wasn’t just corrupt, he was also racially-biased.”
Instead, maybe people need a reminder that all of the other non-Chinese families are still equally corrupt in this story, even if they paid less.
They’re all culpable of corruption, and nobody deserves special sympathy here. But William Singer being racially biased isn’t on the Chinese families. That specific angle of it is purely on him.
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Only a Yale education gets you the Yale brand.
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Usc =! Yale.
Not shocked there is a price difference, even on black market
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Edit: sub grifter parents for politicians
The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves. — Henry David Thoreau
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William Singer – who ran the bribery operation – was praying on naive, super-rich Chinese people
thoughts and prayers!
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We tried to exploit an unfair system and it was unfair to us too!
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And the establishment connections.
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I once saw Reginald T. Moneybag running down Baltic Avenue carrying a bag of bills with a stream of 100s fluttering in the wind behind him, that seemed pretty naive behavior given the way the game is run nowadays.
I mean willfully naive, it sure sounds like it, but I remember in the 90s there was an execution in Utah (William Andrews of the Hi-Fi Murders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_murders ) and the Pope and lots of other important people and organizations sent letters to the Governor to commute the death sentence, which at that time at least was a power reserved to the parole board in Utah and not the Governor.
So, the worst kind of falsehood is that which everyone knows is true, because why would you ever try to investigate if the thing everyone knows is true is actually false? And I assume everyone who wrote those letters were about as knowledgeable about the Utah parole board and the Governor and their respective powers as the average person - meaning they knew Governors pardon death sentences with last minute calls to the Gas Chamber in the middle of the night, no reason to look up if that’s right.
So maybe everyone in China knows you bribe the western universities to get in? Phrasing it like that it actually doesn’t sound too strange, as I understand it in China everyone is guaranteed access to higher education (although I assume there are going to be some social class, racial crap in there somewhere to keep out groups out), if in a situation like that you hear in America you don’t go unless you pay enough money it must sound weird and confusing. And so the common wisdom is born.
At any rate I don’t expect the rich and powerful to refrain from making stupid decisions about anything t, even when that thing is what to me seems like a great amount of money and to them must seem relatively little.
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Charging what the market will bear. It’s just good capitalism, er…I mean business practice. Grifters gotta grift.
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