The Contract On America 2.0 - The Radical Right's Plan For Completing The Destruction Of America

Leave it to the morally and intellectually bankrupt Republicans to come up with a plan that proposes our country take a number of giant leaps backward. Meanwhile, they assert with a straight face that these proposals show they are not The Party of No. Interesting concept... NOT The Party of NO.

It reminds me of a lyric from the 1956 Broadway show, L'il Abner, whose song Jubilation T. Cornpone, mockingly portrayed a cowardly, incompetent Confederate General:

When we fought the Yankees and annihilation was near,

Who was there to lead the charge that took us safe to the rear?

Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone...

The first thing that these inhumane monsters on the right want to do is say NO to, to repeal, or at least hamstring health care reform enough so it limps along accomplishing nothing. So, people with pre-existing conditions, poorer children, marginal wage-earners, the almost-old and a host of others will find themselves tossed off the gurney and into the unknown. 


The second thing the radicals want to do is to say NO to spending the rest of the stimulus package. This at the very time when the funds yet to be spent will be pumped into infrastructure, education, and towards mitigating the housing crisis. 


The radicals are also saying NO to Social Security and Medicare at a time when millions and millions of Baby Boomers are reaching age 65. In the jolly spirit of their Know-Nothingism, though, Republicans have not made clear the specifics of how cuts would be carried out. 


They also are saying NO to federal funding of abortions. NO to non-traditional marriage. NO to the rescission of the odious "Don't ask don't tell" policy in our armed forces. NO to a pathway to citizenship for aliens who serve in the armed forces. NO to a tax rise for the rich who are the only group to have achieved any personal economic growth in the last 15 years. NO to any legislation that the radicals believe is "unconstitutional," meaning anything they disagree with. NO to any sort of deficit spending, one of the pillars of modern state-interventionist economics. 


What is absent from the New And Unimproved Contract On America? 

• Any mention of education funding whether for Head Start, English-As-A-Second-Language Programs, Anti-Drop-Out funding, or higher education funding. In other words, NO.
• A mention, even in passing, of a coherent energy policy. Not even one that is pro-oil, which we might understandably expect. So, NO again.
• Some sort of viewpoint on the continuing degradation of the environment? NO.
• Proposals on how to deal with our increasingly at-risk food supply? NO.
• Thoughts on how to deal with the continuing off-shoring of American jobs? NO.
• Cutting out-of-control defense spending? NO.

The impulse to blame government for every ill in society is a strong one, and it occurs in equal measure on the left and right. 

The chief difference is that the left generally believes in the perfectability of government, really an optimistic position that is about our own personal perfectability, and one that reflects the positive or "YES" nature of leftist politics through the centuries. 

The right simply wants to burn the social contract and scatter its ashes, believing deep down that government per se is evil, that the individual is all that matters, that the accumulation of personal wealth at the expense of the commonweal is the preferable condition of society. In spasms of atavism, they wish to return to an existence in the "state of nature" that Hobbes so famously described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Let's see how they're doing.

Solitary - play each of us off against the other politically. Fear thy neighbor, especially if he or she has a different-color skin or religion. Check.

Poor - the decline of the middle and lower middle class over the last 30 years. Destroy unions, import cheap illegal labor, ship well-paying jobs overseas, allow under-priced imports into country. Check.

Nasty - prevent people of the same sex from choosing their marriage partners. Check.

Brutish - shouting down opponents at town hall meetings, toting guns to political rallies, portraying a President as a (take your pick) monkey, a dictator, a terrorist. Don't exactly wear a Brown Shirt, but, you know, like, um, act like you're a Brown Shirt. Check.

Short - those without health insurance die almost 6 years earlier than those with it. Check.
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What The Right Wing Radicals Would Like To Do For You Now

Let's start close to New York - right across the mighty Hudson in New Jersey - where the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing governor, Chris Christie, recently vetoed, (the N.J. legislature failed to override it) a renewal of a provision in the state tax code that calls for a 10.75% tax on income over $1 million per year. That means that if you earned $1 more than $1 million you would pay 10.75 cents in taxes on that dollar.

The poorly-described "millionaires' tax" would have raised $637 million for rebate checks of up to $1,295 for some 600,000 senior citizens who would otherwise face steep increases in their property taxes during fiscal 2011.

And this in a state where there is a budget shortfall of over 37% in relation to revenues.

All over the news: oil industry's darling Representative Joe Barton's comparison of the BP compensation fund with a "shakedown," comparing it to the worst in Chicago's checkered political payoff past. It is bad enough that Barton, the ranking minority member on the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, would say such a thing. But other Republicans have chimed in, particularly candidates in swing seats running for election against Democrats this fall. Two candidates to run against Russ Feingold in the Wisconsin Senate race have this to say.

Ron Johnson:

It is very troubling when we circumvent the rule of law. I think they would have been held liable, and that would be the way to do this.

Dave Westlake:

Shaking BP down for $20 billion doesn't do anything to further that end [stopping the leak] or to get the oil cleaned up faster.

In Colorado, an aide to former front-runner Jane Norton (Ken Buck now leads in some polls for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination) called the rescue cash a "slush fund."

They have all taken their lead from a Republican Party memo and from the unofficial head of the party, Rush Limbaugh, who has termed the extraction of the promise to compensate financial losses for the working class and small business entrepreneurial class in the Gulf region, "thuggery."

No mention of the negligent thuggery that created the explosion that essentially murdered 11 people and is creating environmental chaos throughout one of the world's most beautiful bodies of water.

If this weren't enough, conservative J.D. Hayworth who is challenging John McCain in the Senate primary in the Nut Bin State, Arizona, served as an infomercial shill for "National Grants Conference," one of those scam companies that promises people - desperate people - a chance to get "free money" from the government through grant money that happens to be lying around doing nothing. The cost of the seminars for information that is available free from many traditional sources - $1000.

So, J.D., what's this about the government being too big and wasting taxpayer money?  

The Wall Street Journal reports today:

"Now the Florida-based firm that produced the infomercial, National Grants Conferences, is facing bankruptcy. The company racked up hundreds of consumer complaints that led many Better Business Bureau chapters around the country to give it an "F" rating."

Meanwhile, right wing Republicans are blocking an extender bill for unemployment benefits. The bill would extend benefits for 12 million people who have been out of work for over a year.

At the same time, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the most backward state in the Union, has been mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2012.

He has been a skeptic about the effects of the oil catastrophe in the Gulf states, except for Louisiana to which his heart goes out, and now blames the national press for economic hardships the fisheries and tourist industry are suffering. What's IN that gumbo in Mississippi? He also has blasted the President's moratorium on deep water drilling, claiming that the economic impact of that will be more devastating than the slump other business in the Gulf will experience.

Tim Scott, invariably described as a "charismatic black man," is poised to win the GOP nomination to run for a Congressional seat in South Carolina. Scott, however, is somewhere right of Clarence Thomas, and is "black" in skin tone only. He's more the kind of guy who would have been serving mint juleps at a lynching of his fellow African-Americans in the 1870s. Right wing is right wing, dangerous is dangerous, no matter what your skin color, gender, or religion. 

Back up north, Scott Brown is lobbying furiously behind the scenes to give big banks a bye on trading of derivatives. Keep in mind that Brown received $450,000 from banks in the last 6 days of his successful Senate run. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Welcome to the Republican future.

Oil In The Gulf And The Toxic Tort Lawyer As Folk Hero

For decades now, the right wing has been ranting about "trial lawyers." The phrase is a code word for lawyers who sue large corporations on behalf of citizens, groups of citizens in class action suits, states and local governmental entities. 

The rightist radicals draw a portrait of the lawyers as little more than highly paid ambulance chasers. Is there a seamy side, a parasitic side to "trial lawyers?" Of course. Just as there is a seamy side to practically every profession from the clergy to agriculture to unions.

On the whole, however, the "trial lawyer" is the last line of defense - often the ONLY defense - against the many predatory practices of corporations. Big pharma, agribusiness, energy producers, crib makers, transportation providers, the tobacco purveyors and a dozen others truly fear the "trial lawyers," because they know they are in for trouble once a suit is filed.

One of the most capable and relentless of these tort lawyers, the appropriate term for the job, is New Orleans native Stuart Smith, long a champion against big oil, big polluters in the Gulf. Just one day after the fire and explosion on the rig, Smith was on the case.

"On Thursday, I could smell the oil and, being a toxic tort lawyer, I realized that the fact that you're smelling something means that you're inhaling something," said Smith when breezes were carrying the scent of the oil slick toward his beloved city. Smith, who has sued major oil companies before, immediately contacted toxicologists and air monitors to start doing tests that could be used as evidence. (As reported in the Washington Post.)

Smith believes that if the leak lasts another 2 months or so, the fishing beds and coastline could be ruined for generations. The devastation could cost the Gulf fishing and tourism industries tens of billions of dollars, more money than BP or any half dozen big polluters could pony up.

In 1992, Smith was the first plaintiff’s attorney to take an oil company to trial for damages caused by radioactive oilfield waste. Street v. Chevron pitted the owners of a mom-and-pop pipe yard located in rural southeastern Mississippi against a multinational oil conglomerate. Chevron had sent radioactive oilfield pipe to Street, Inc., for cleaning –  without informing the owners that the pipe contained radioactive material.

Investigators from the Mississippi state Division of Radiological Health found radiation on the Street property 500 times the natural-occurring level. The suit charged that 38 people, not only the owners and workers, but also children and other family members, had “suffered physical and psychological harm because of their exposure to low levels of radiation and that Shell and Chevron should have warned them about the ‘inherent dangers.’ ” 

The suit sought $35 million in damages. Shell settled early in the process, but Chevron vigorously defended the case during six months of trial. The oil giant ultimately settled the case for an undisclosed amount of money in what remains one of the longest-running jury trials in Mississippi history. The ruling opened the door to further suits associated with damages from oilfield radiation.

In 2001, Smith and his law partner Michael Stag successfully prosecuted the widely publicized Grefer case. The Grefers sued an Exxon contractor for contaminating their 33-acre parcel of land in Louisiana with TERM (technologically enhanced radioactive materials). After a six-week trial, a Louisiana jury returned a verdict of $1.056 billion against a contractor of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, in favor of Mr. Smith’s client, retired judge Joseph Grefer.

The court ordered Exxon to pay the Grefers $56 million in compensatory damages, to clean up their land, and slapped the oil giant with $1 billion in punitive damages.

The most insidious side of the Grefer case is that it appears Exxon knew about the radioactive material and did nothing to alert either the Grefers or its contractor. The court stated that from June 1986 to March 1987, “Exxon officials intentionally withheld information,” and that the company “knew the [radioactive] scale [inside the pipes] posed a direct danger to the physical health of those workers.”

Has Smith made great money by bringing these suits? No doubt. But really, what he and others like him are doing is to function as an ad hoc branch of government. And mounting further suits is time-consuming and costly.

Polluters, who could easily be monitored and prevented from polluting, experience very little oversight by government agencies. They pollute, are usually caught, and the government slaps them on the wrist with a wet noodle.

It is left to Smith and other tort lawyers to "prosecute" the cases the government should have prevented in the first place. No one else is protecting innocent victims from the polluters' activities. 

Is it any wonder that the right wing boot-lickers want to stringently limit the size of jury awards in cases involving many industries but especially energy? The right would leave us defenseless from the inception of a drilling or digging project through to the inevitable catastrophe created by polluters.

The right would gut current "strong" regulations, see to it there is no funding for policing under remaining flimsy laws often written by industry insiders, and finally do away with the tort lawyers' ability to find recourse for victims and/or the overall commonly held environment.

People like Stuart Smith may be be doing very well financially. Deservedly. Perhaps they are even rich, but they are folk heroes nonetheless.

Smith said: "Oil companies are the meanest, nastiest defendants in the country. They just don't care; they have so much money."

..

Maternal and Infant Mortality: The Bitter Fruit of Right Wing Resistance To Health Care Reform

When I started this blog, before I went astray, I hoped to continually point out the connection between virulent right wing policies and (often tragic) outcomes among people. As they say, back to the roots.

Amnesty International has issued a report - Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the U.S.A. - showing that the maternal death rate during and immediately after giving birth in the United States has doubled in the last 20 years. (On the local level, New York State ranks 47th of 50 states on the negative side of this troubling statistic.) In 1987, the rate was 6.6 maternal deaths per 100,000 births. Today it is close to 14 per 100,000.

The likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the USA is five times greater than in Greece, four times greater than in Germany, and three times greater than in Spain. Greece has the lowest rate at 1 death per 100,000 births, a number that probably represents an absolute achievement. Many things may be wrong with Greece economically at the moment; this isn't one of them.

The United States ranks 40th in the world in this category in spite of the fact that we spend more on health care than any other country. Women in America suffer 2 to 3 deaths per DAY while giving birth, or about 9,000 deaths per year. Another 34,000 experience what Amnesty calls "near misses," meaning that new mothers come close to dying during the birth and immediate postpartum period.

African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. This disparity has not improved in more than 27 years.

As bad, according to the U.S. census, the infant mortality rate here is 630 per 100,000 births (6.3 per 1,000). Even more shockingly, the District of Columbia's rate is 14 deaths per 1,000 births. Right in the shadow of the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court.

A few things that Health Care Reform was designed to address? Prenatal care, nutrition, prevention, and pre-existing conditions. Additional access to mental health and drug and alcohol addiction services is also built in.

Of course, the right wing, in its infinite wisdom, in its cynical pomposity, in its reckless disregard of the lives of actual living human beings as opposed to fetuses - potential but not actual human beings - made sure that provisions for abortion at any stage of gestation were deprived of funding. And funding for birth control for minors is severely restricted. (In fact only half of the states currently have options for free birth control, and under the new legislation states will still have a "veto" over providing free birth control and even birth control information to minors without parental consent.)

How many deaths are attributable to such restrictions?

We know that the younger a female is the more likely it is that she and/or her baby will have complications. (We also know that there is another set of risks for women over 40.) Women and girls under 20 account for about 8% of all births in the United States. These 8% of births account for about 38% of all maternal and infant deaths at or shortly after delivery.

Impoverished women account for about 61% of such deaths.

We hope that better prenatal care and nutrition will help to some degree.

Free access to birth control and early and mid-term abortions, however, is crucial to saving the lives of these women and girls, and would save the lives of those babies being born in less than dangerous circumstances.

This can only be blamed on the fanatical religious right wing who insist on enshrining their rigid beliefs on an altar upon which drips the blood of thousands of young, poor women and their new babies. An ounce of prevention...

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”
                     - Martin Luther King

What's Really Eating The Right Wing?

The whole world saw the virulence of the right wing over the weekend. The irrationality. The bigotry. The anti-Americanism that runs deep in veins, hearts and souls.

Using expressions like "nigger," "faggot," "baby killer," and John Boehner's sad, yet comical, "Hell no's" make us lose our breath as we realize again that these are actually our fellow citizens. "Unhinged" is the most accurate way to describe what the right wing extremists are right now. The door has flown off the frame.

So what is really gnawing at the "Party of I Don't Know?"

Let's clear racism out of the way first. It's a symptom. Clearly the rightists are terminally apoplectic that there is an African-American at the helm.

The outraged, foaming-at-the-mouth Tea Party-inspired mobs are virtually all white. (Try a Google image search and look at the crowds.) Republican Party enrollment is 95% white. The power structures of the states making up the Republican base are preponderantly white. The money behind all their guff is white.

There is something deeper in the right wing malaise, and it is from those depths that the racism, homophobia, disrespect and stubborn resistance to progress spring: they believe their own press.

Now that their illusions have been shattered by the health care reform vote, they are as hormonal as teenagers, as moody, sullen, hair-triggered and hare-brained.

A day doesn't go by that "Morning Joe" Scarborough or Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and now Glenn Beck pump up the hydrophobic base by saying something like, "America is and has always been a center-right country." They must live in some dream town that most of us have never visited, one we don't recognize from even basic textbooks.

Every single thing that has made us great in our own eyes or in the eyes of the world has been, well, socialistic or communalistic. Without exception.

That's the country I see and love. A bunch of driven, talented, educated, dedicated people who say "Let's band together and_______." (Fill in the blank) Not to say we haven't had plenty of nasty bumps, bruises and regrets in the America I know. (Recalling this weekend that Representative John Lewis was nearly beaten to death by Alabama State Police in Selma in 1965 reminds us that we still hike the long, rocky road to essential equality even after 400 years.) 

Despite the right wing's hallucinatory thinking, government involvement in every important event of our history is a given.

Begin with the Louisiana Purchase, a government action much maligned at the time passed the House by only 2 votes. Then continue the historic tour on the Erie Canal, which the State of New York funded to the tune of $7 million in 1817. Using a factoring process by putting the 1817 price in relation to current GDP, the cost of the canal would be about $125 billion today. (By those lights, New York State on its own could build a New York to Buffalo/New York to Montreal high speed train as well as a mega-fast internet network and still have money left over for Broadway tickets for the entire state's population.)

Seward's Ice Box - Alaska - cost about 2 cents per acre in 1867. Unenlightened government would have just skipped it. Good thing we owned it in 1967 or the Soviets would have been in our kitchen.

Speaking of railroads, not just the transcontinental line but practically the entire nationwide system was made possible by government largesse and encouragement through "granted" land, loan guarantees and favorable laws. Building the railroads without government involvement was inconceivable. (Ditto for our road system, water, sewer and schools.)

One could go on, whether it's the building of all hospitals for which taxpayers foot 55% of the bill for construction, or public universities, space exploration, or, or, or... the list is endless.

So just how do the righteous rightists come up with their anti-social material? They believe not only their own press, but a truncated and bowdlerized version of American history.

What do you think all the tricornered hats and Revolutionary War regalia of the Tea Party are about? History didn't really happen, it's a Saturday morning cartoon. You might as well trade in Foghorn Leghorn's version of the Civil War for Ken Burns's.

Take the real Boston Tea Party. It actually helped in the struggle that later brought about representative government in the 13 colonies. What the Tea Partiers then wanted, they got. What the Tea Partiers of today want is a retreat from representative government into a rule by mob, or at the very least by a narrow-minded subset of a minority party.

In their version of American history, "men were men and women damned glad of it." The only thing that mattered was grit, hard work and pluck.

The Homestead Acts of 1862, 1909 and 1916 had nothing to do with it. The Social Security Acts of 1935 and '65? Irrelevant.

And never would the GI Bill have seen the light of day in 1944. (Arm blown off on D-Day? Fix yer own dad-blamed problems and stop mooching off the government.)

The Tennessee Valley would still be doing its homework by kerosene lamp.

National Parks would be trailer parks.

In the extremist view of history, only myth lives. It's too tiresome to do the real studying (by lamplight or otherwise) that might lead to a deeper understanding of the role government has played from the outset of the American odyssey.

If all government intervention in our lives has been so bad, how did we get where we are today? How did we get to "The American Century?" How are we now poised for the second American Century?

Somehow the radical right believes ignorance paves the path to power. They found out something quite different Sunday night.

Food Fights and Political Philosophy

Misinformation followed us like a plague.

   - Paul Simon, Peace Like a River

Two seemingly distinct issues about the food we eat demonstrate how the radical, minimalist approach to government espoused by the dangerous rightists adrift in the land cause direct harm to us, the eating public.The radical right would like even less government involvement in food safety and purity just at a time when we need more. Much, much more.

The first issue concerns the soft drink sugar tax working its way through New York State's Legislature. The second is a report from Pew Charitable Research that totals up the economic impact of food-borne diseases, a shocking $152 billion per year.

I came across this article in Advertising Age on Wednesday (March3). It clearly stakes out the positions of the Alliance For A Healthier New York (pro) and the American Beverage Association (con, surprise).

"Sugar-sweetened beverages play a significant role in New York's obesity epidemic," Lisa Altshuler said in a statement from the alliance. "This campaign is about sending a message that by adding a small excise tax on soda and other sugary drinks, we can reduce consumption of these empty calories and make real progress towards making all New Yorkers healthier."

The penny-per-ounce tax will be put against threatened health care cuts on the table due to the recession. Makes sense.

"New Yorkers aren't buying at all that this tax has anything to do with public health, nor that a penny of it will go to health programs," said Kevin Keane, senior VP-public affairs at the American Beverage Association. He goes on to contend that "People view it as an overreach when government uses the tax code to tell them what to eat or drink."

But what Mr. Keane is really arguing for is the rights of the industry he represents to continue to slowly and sadistically poison our children with sugar. No one needs reminding that the childhood obesity rate in the country is of epidemic proportions. The general rate for kids is about 15% and for poor children an astronomical 40%. The beverage industry then is victimizing the least informed among us, and those who most need healthier foods in their diets.

If the beverage industry came out with self-governing rules mandating warnings broadcast in the media, or voluntarily placed warning labels on bottles, he might have a very small case. But they don't and he doesn't.

The fact is that the government - which means all of us - has a vested interest in better health.

The FDA is responsible for monitoring food safety. Its budget for 2010 is around $3 billion. Yet society incurs $152 billion yearly in costs related to tainted foods. (See US News Report on the Pew findings by clicking here.)

One would think that until the efficacy of the FDA increases enough to come close to eradicating tainted food, that its budget should increase. However, our old friends, the lobbyists, funded by agribusiness, supermarket chains, mass meat producers and fast food chains, lean hard on politicians, from the federal government on down to the most local level.

(Keep in mind that the FDA also monitors drug and supplement safety. So, we can factor in another enormous set of costs being passed onto society through egregiously poor oversight. There are fewer than 8,000 FDA inspectors on the job.)

Every year 76 million Americans are sickened by impurities in food. Thousands die. Hundreds of thousands miss work. Billions are spent on medical treatment.

During the past 35 years, the decrease in funding for inspection of our food supply has forced FDA to impose a 78 percent reduction in food inspections, at a time when the food industry has been rapidly expanding and food importation has exponentially increased. FDA estimates that, at most, it inspects food manufacturers once every 10 years.
      - 2007 Food and Drug Administration subcommittee report

This has been due to a radical ideological shift right from the 1970s when the FDA was one of the MOST trusted government departments (81%) to today when it is one of the least trusted (at 36%).

The most persistent line of attack was concisely expressed by Newt Gingrich, who dubbed the FDA the "number-one job killer in America." This is misinformation of the most despicable kind.

Let us say for a moment that the $152 billion in economic impact could somehow be translated directly into jobs. $152 billion would represent 2.5 million jobs per year at the above-average pay of $60,000 per year. I'm not enough of an economist to project what $152 billion dollars over ten years (a total of $1.5 trillion) would do if it were invested in infrastructure, research, green energy, or education, but I am sure the multiplier effect would be spectacular. 

There are some real consequences of right wing radicalism. But people keep voting for these most monstrous of human beings.

The Price of Tea

College Loan Revamping Threatened By Greedy Lobbyists and Complicit Senators

From The New York Times February 5, 2010 (Click here for full article):

"Sallie Mae, a publicly traded company that is the nation’s biggest student lender with $22 billion in loans originated last year, led the field in spending $8 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double the year before, and other lenders spent millions of dollars more, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics." 

As discussed on New York Liberal State of Mind, January 29, 2010, the revision/rehabilitation of the way Federal college loans are administered is being threatened by self-serving lobbyists. (See original blog post).

The projected savings in the bill over 10 years would be $80 billion dollars.

The private lenders are often enormous institutions like Sallie Mae, Citi, and Wells Fargo, although there are many mid-size competitors, many of which are not household names unless you're in the market for a student loan.

Industry lobbyists claim that some, although they can't or won't say how many, of the 35,000 jobs will be lost if the government takes the reins of the out-of-control profits the companies are making. Let's make an extreme case: one quarter of those 35,000 jobs will be lost under the new plan, or 8750 jobs.

By distributing that $80 billion dollars in savings amongst those theoretical 8750 workers if they are not laid off, each of those jobs would be subsidized by taxpayers at the rate of $91,000 per year, every year over the ten year cycle. Who wouldn't love to run a company with that kind of government subsidy? I volunteer immediately to receive my $91,000.

Put another way, the financial institutions will be receiving $266 from every man, woman and child in America in order to save these pointless jobs. (We know that children don't pay taxes, and we also know that about 1/4th of all adults pay little or no taxes, so you can figure your real share is more along the lines of $400 to support big banks and the like. Great, isn't it?)

There are many alternatives to the current system leaving aside straight up federal administration. States could administer the loans, as could colleges, or scholarship foundations. Direct grants could be made to students using the savings.

Interestingly, Sallie Mae, while it was spending $8 million in lobbying last year maintains a "scholarships" program. The amount they give away? $250,000 - about 3% of what they spend for lobbying. Click here for their "scholarships" page.

There has also been a shocking degree of corruption and lack of oversight of the program as now administered. Educational institutions are entwined with the lenders on an unimaginable scale. Click here to read some highlights - or low-lights, as the case may be.

Frightening Survey of Republican "Values" By the Daily Kos

Click here for the survey

While I am only the grandchild and great-grandchild of immigrants, a certain amount of my ancestors' values rubbed off on me. 

First and foremost they believed in knowledge. It could have been knowledge about anything - a trade, the natural world, a language, history, politics, mathematics. Being free young people, we could pretty much choose our fields of interest. "Study hard and be smart," they might have said. "Smarter than we are." When we began to surpass them in book learning, they would tease us by calling us "Professor," or "Doctor," often in Italian, but their faces also beamed with pride and joy.

None of my grandparents went beyond the 8th grade, and my parents only graduated from high school, although my father had "some college."  Even though they were all staunch Catholics, I never heard them speak of creationism, or doubt the theory of evolution.  Science and medicine were practically worshiped. History took the silver medal; we were from a culture that was 2700 years old, after all. And speaking well, utilizing good grammar and elegant words, earned even more kudos. It was shameful to be ignorant. Better to keep silent rather than betray your own stupidity. 

Now, however, in the dangerously right wing Republican Party, there has somehow grown up a pride in ignorance, misinformation, and lack of awareness. Even so radical a commentator as William Kristol warned the New Know Nothings in 2006 in The Weekly Standard against "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party..." adding, "It could easily dash Republican hopes of becoming a long-term governing party. How many Republicans will have the courage to stand up and prevent the yahoos from driving the party off a cliff?”

Click here for the survey

The Showboat Comes To Vermont

So now we can add Vermont to the long, illustrious list of states that have seceded, or have wanted to secede. Welcome, Showboaters, to the Green Mountain State! (Article from Time Magazine)

Some people in the state, who call their group Second Vermont Republic, hope VT joins not just the former Confederacy but Rick Perry and the Fightin' and Snortin' Texans of today in pulling our country apart. Bravo. More shallow thinking from the fringe, which apparently is an equal opportunity magnet for nuts and bolters from both right and left. 

And apparently, the left far-outs are just as capable of indulging themselves in fuzzy economics, fuzzy history and silly crystal ball gazing. 

You have to appreciate a bunch of guys, however, with flannel shirts, fancy cars, jobs with mega computer companies and a twisted sense of humor. At least I find them funny - I mean funny like a clown.

It's really just more media circus showboating and it's depressing to see it coming from Vermont, of all places, which gave us founding uber-patriots Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, Abe Lincoln's highest margin of victory in any state, and a 15% mortality rate in the Civil War, a rate higher than any other state.

Maybe they don't remember Abe. You know, that President who said at Gettysburg: The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. Yep, that Abe. The one who separatists assassinated with a bullet from behind.

What's even sadder is that the Vermont-firsters, like one of their leaders Thomas Naylor, are living in some sort of Disneyland of the North. Naylor says, for instance:"Not only would an independent Vermont survive. It would thrive, because it would free up entrepreneurial forces heretofore held in abeyance." 

And where would those mystical forces come from? Nova Scotia? You can be sure it won't be coming from the remaining United States, because the hostility and reluctance to invest for 100 years, if the experience of the Confederates is any indication, will be suffocating.

By the way, showboaters on both ends of the extreme fringe exhibit a reflexive compulsion to use high-fallutin' language to validate wobbly positions, their blah blah blahing obscuring the lack of deep analysis. Contrast Naylor's leaden prose with Lincoln's simple, powerful words. ("Heretofore held in abeyance..." Have they been consulting the Foghorn Leghorn Manual of Style?) 

Some economic facts of life... Vermont ranks a fair-to-middling 34th in per capita income in the United States ($35,493). You could count on that dropping by 20% even before secession became reality, as companies began moving their operations across the borders to NH, NY and MA, or QUE. So you'll be down to about $28,000 per capita before you can say "Freedom and Unity," the state's motto. That will put you down with states like Arkansas.

And making things difficult for "out-of-state" corporations, as another leader of the showboat movement hopes to do, will surely not help that Deep South level of performance. 

Moreover, there would be costs associated with a breakaway - for instance, all those nice federally-funded schools, roads, and so forth. Train tracks? Guess what? Airports - uh-oh. Any power plant, whether traditional or alternative, that took any kind of fed money? We'll be wanting them back, or at least will want you to pay for them. Plus a premium for causing the rest of us annoyance. You sure don't think the rest of us, who appreciate the Union even with all its difficulties and frustrating aspects - are going to actually let you keep infrastructure we all paid for, do you? Showboaters.

Now, I know that Vermont was a "republic" for about 14 years. And the Second Vermont Republic is somehow seeking linkage with that 220 year old "republic."

But, for much of that time there was no other country, as we understand the term, in North America. Indeed, all the colonies were mini-nations - states in waiting. None of them were forced to ratify the Constitution. Anyone of them might have stayed independent. Nevertheless, Rhode Island ratified in May of 1790 and the country was born in its current form. Vermont joined the Union less than a year later in March of 1791. So, you were kinda, sorta, almost unique for about 10 months. 

Get off the high horse. Get off the showboat. Join the real battle.

Speaking of NO - right wing says no to more efficient college loans

Bill ending banks' role in student loans stalls in Senate  from the Washington Post 1/29/10

The breadth of the effects of the right wing's nay saying is sickening. As millions of aspiring kids and their families struggle to figure out how to finance college tuition, the Senate Republicans are saying NO to a bill passed by the House last year that would save families $80 billion dollars over the next ten years, largely by eliminating bank fees and profits. What's not to like? 

Ask Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee who said, in some sort of Orwellian double-speak, "Relying on budgetary gimmicks to stage another Washington takeover, this time of 15 million student loans, is not good for college students. The Department of Education in Washington will not be able to serve students as well as 3,000 lending institutions."  Mr. Alexander has been the recipient of more than $500,000 in contributions from the securities and banking industry since 2005, by the way.

Now, those institutions range across a broad spectrum of size and kind. But let's take an average. This average bank would, if the legislation fails, earn $26,667,000 over that ten year period, or roughly $2.7 million per year. Alexander claims this is a government "takeover." Senator, this is a federally funded, federally guaranteed program. The banks have been used to administer the funds but, because of their dubious records over the last 10+ years and their excessive profits torn from the skin of the backs of the middle-class, they have lost their privileges. Direct lending of taxpayer money back to taxpayers seems to make eminent good sense. And, as the right wing is so fond of trumpeting, it would cut inefficiencies. 

Who is really for the American people when millions of struggling kids need college financing?

Certainly not the right wing, which wants to wring every last nickel out of the middle class, and has no moral compunction about doing so.