College Education––Public or Private...or For-Profit?

Bernie’s free tuition proposal is only “radical” and “unrealistic” if you reject the policies that worked very well from Truman through Carter and accept and want to keep all of the rich-favoring tax breaks that came about since Reagan reset our economy. It was Reagan that set us on the road to dysfunction and unfairness.

This appeared in my news feed a minute ago from the Bernie campaign. Kind of puts the whole thing in context.

Bill Moyers explains some of the new tricks the for-profit college "industry" uses to fleece college students. This is why certain things don't lend themselves to the profit model. When you are focused on profit above all you are obligated to deliver profits when colleges should be obligated to deliver education.

Two Examples Show How The Legal System Is Stacked In Favor Of The Rich

This is what happens to people at the bottom of the justice system. Reported today at VOX.

This is what happens to the people at the top. Reported today in the New Yorker.

A 75 year old disabled man in Mississippi who did time many years ago for robbery is tried for marijuana possession. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison, a mandatory sentence because of his 20-year old conviction for robbery. The Supreme Court refuses to consider his appeal. Apparently life imprisonment for marijuana possession is not cruel and unusual punishment. Or the Supreme Court can’t be bothered. This is what happens to people at the bottom of the system.

Meanwhile the SEC, the agency charged with investigating and bringing charges against the largest financial companies, hesitates to prosecute individuals who made billions by defrauding millions of ordinary Americans during the financial crisis.

Why?

Because the man at the SEC who was in charge of the case had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”

People at the top level of massive multi-billion dollar frauds that ruined thousands of ordinary people’s lives are “real people” who “have done one bad thing” but a sad old disabled onetime felon who possesses pot is nobody.

The poor man in Mississippi is nobody that anybody running the system knows personally. Nobody the prosecutors care about. Prosecutors mingle with “real people” who earn massive fortunes, sometimes by fraud. The fraudulent seem very plausible, that is how they are able to commit the fraud. The larger the fraud, the more plausible and real they seem. Prosecutors don’t enjoy mingling with people at the lower end of the criminal spectrum where their misfortune and desperation makes them less plausible and less deserving.

Successful criminals who have massive fortunes and fabulous Manhattan apartments plus expensive homes in various luxury enclaves are real people but ex-cons who live quietly on a farm in Mississippi are not real people––at least in the eyes of the law. There have been multiple cases rejected by the right hand side of the Supreme Court, cases where a man has been proved innocent but is still facing the death penalty. The conservatives on the court shrug and say No. But the criminal who has stolen massive amounts of money from millions of unsuspecting Americans gets a pass. Someone who seems that real and that plausible must not have meant any harm. He can keep his houses and his money.

This is what Americans are angry about. This is what Bernie Sanders is listening to. This might be the kind of non-violent marijuana "offender" President Obama pardons. But we need to repair the system, not simply hope that occasionally a hand reaches down from the sky and corrects one or a handful of the terrible injustices. This is why electing a Democrat president is so vital this year. It would begin to redress the harm and rebalance the scales in favor of regular people.

Inside Vs. Outside in the Democratic Party

An article in the Guardian is saying the insiders might be able to install Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee whether she wins the popular vote in the primaries or not.

If true, if this is really happening, it is dead wrong and defeatist. A recipe for disaster. A big opportunity thrown away.

If it's just a perception it is a perception that needs to be debunked by the DNC.

The party machinery must be there to empower the voters not dictate to them or to tip the scales.

If Hillary wins the nomination legitimately, by getting the votes, she will need the Bernie voters behind her in November, just as Bernie will need the Hillary voters if he is the nominee.

Hillary stepped gracefully aside in 2008 and joined the Obama administration in 2009. She respected the voters. I admire that. She has a great resumé. She has incredible political gifts. Women all over the country feel a woman president is long overdue, as do I. But it isn't cynical or anti-feminist to feel that Bernie might be a better candidate, that he represents a larger slice of the electorate, reaching outside the core of the party, perhaps reaching people in other parts of the country who have never voted for a Democrat. We don't know who has the stronger chance at winning. Voting in primaries is how these things are sorted out.

But Bernie is the real deal. He's shown that. An authentic champion of the interests of Americans who work for a living against the entrenched power of the much smaller group of Americans who own for a living. He has tapped into something powerful by speaking honestly and bravely without worrying about big donors or powerful people. He represents the outsider, which is most of us, against the insider, which Hillary Clinton most definitely is. Her inside game could mean she'd achieve more. Bernie's outside game could mean he'd be able to remake our politics, strengthen the progressive side by sheer force of numbers. He might set up an off-year wave of upsets to retake the Congress and statehouses.

I think the Bernie Sanders phenomenon represents an even stronger version of the wave that brought Obama into office: the sudden and enthusiastic involvement of millions of previously disengaged voters is something we’d be fools to throw away.

We have gotten into the habit in this country of engineering our politics, of prearranging the winners or (as in 2000) anointing someone who hasn’t won the popular vote, of the elders deciding what the children should have for dinner. The children have grown up and won’t have that.

It is true that the popular vote can be dangerous, as we see on the GOP side where it has been so divorced from our better angels and become pure ID, chasing a reality TV racist and sociopath, a billionaire who plays to our hatreds and our fears.

It is unfair and untrue to create a false equivalency between Bernie and Trump. They are both populists but Bernie is not one to rev up fascist emotions in the voting public. Trump is.

It's the GOP that divides us up by class and race and gender in order to control us.

The DNC should be the opposite of that.

I think it's time for both candidates to sit with the DNC and establish a process that will see fair play and a true expression of the will of the voters, an open nomination process without cronies, without the insider machinery, without resorting to the ill-named SuperDelegates.

I seem to remember this idea of Super Delegates emerged as a tool to prevent coups similar to the Lyndon LaRouche phenomenon which messed up our process in the 1980s. Bernie is not Lyndon LaRouche. He is tapping into decades of very legitimate anger and grievance but he is not exploiting these emotions to force the 12-tone scale onto classical orchestras or to create a right wing monster out of far flung parts of the Democratic Party. The Super Delegate is a relic. It echoes the Orwellian phrase about some pigs being more equal than others. It gives the party sages a feeling of involvement but the party is not about them, it is about the voters.

If the DNC is setting up a pre-ordained nomination they, and we, are throwing away an enormous wave of energy. New voters, fresh blood, fresh enthusiasm, a chance to build on what Barack Obama began in 2009, which the Republicans did their damnedest to block at every turn. The GOP seeks to divide us up and suppress the will of the voters. That is the sort of thing that makes voters cynical and disengaged. That is the GOP’s strategy. We shouldn’t be playing that hand too.

I will vote for whoever wins. Gladly. Hillary is a strong candidate. Bernie is a strong candidate. But if we split, we lose. We can't afford to lose this one.

Bias In Journalism...and it aint' liberal

(Trump Gets All the Media Attention. While Bernie Has More Voter Support)

Dear ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, TIME, et al...

ABC World News Tonight Has Devoted 81 Minutes To Trump, One Minute To Sanders. This according to The Tyndal Report, which tracks these things.

Endless focus on a outrage-spewing narcissist demoralizes voters. Is that the goal?

The bogus false equivalency standard makes it hard to call out the outrageousness, because failure to find an equal amount of outrage on the Democratic side would make the news organization feel guilty of bias. So instead they air it without analysis. Unfiltered. And the public assumes what is not called a lie must be the truth, what is not labelled outrageous must be publicly acceptable.

Do we require every bit of sound science be balanced with an equal amount of garbage science? Well…. maybe we do see that a lot.

Which makes my point.

TIME chose Ms. Merkel, a remarkable woman most Americans spent about five minutes hearing about this past year and weren’t really interested. Why choose Merkel? Because the obvious contenders were Trump and Sanders. Trump is too disgusting to pick for this honor. Sanders then? Not on your life. It would be biased of TIME to reject a quasi-Republican near-fascist and pick a lefty pragmatist. Their ad sponsors would revolt. (Leftist revolts aren’t the kind they worry about.)

Our news media is seriously messed up.

Maybe you can discuss this over the weekend and think about your coverage going forward.

Pasquino

http://pasquino.blogspot.com

David Brooks, the Explainer of the Working Class

Today’s Fun Facts. How deeply unfair has the American system become? Read on.

Libertarianism is an invention of a mischievous corporate cabal. It’s about their liberty not yours. Read and Learn Here.

David Brooks: “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the working class…” Priceless omniscience from Brooks can be enjoyed here.

And David Brooks understands the working class completely. Like God. Underneath that smooth expensively suited Brooksian facade is a true working man, complete with sweat, weariness, worry about paying the mortgage, fears about some venture capitalist looting his pension, concern about his kids’ lives being poorer than his own. Yeah, Brooks is the working man personified. He knows that the triumph of the working man will only come when he realizes his interests are best served by following instructions. People who work for a living are meant to serve the people who own for a living.

Here ends the Gospel.

Why democracy isn’t working has something to do with the antidemocratic unAmerican concentration of wealth and power. Learn more here.