News & Articles

In the 1960s, I attended the University of North Texas, a public school blessed with good teachers and an educational culture focused on enabling us students to become socially useful citizens. And it was affordable – with close-to-free tuition and a part-time job, I could get a good education, gain experience in everything from work to civic activism, graduate in four years, and obtain a debt-free start in life. We just assumed that’s what college was supposed to be. It still ought to be, but for most students today, it’s not even close.
Indeed, a $1.3 trillion mountain of debt is weighing down students at all types of U.S. colleges, endangering our entire economy. That’s more than people owe on credit cards or auto loans – and it’ll soon surpass the subprime mortgage debt that crashed the economy in 2008.
Private, for-profit, corporate colleges are the biggest creators of this looming danger. To say there are lots of horror stories about them is like saying there are lots of ouchies in a bramble patch. With brand names like University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, Corinthian, Kaplan, and Strayer, they suck up some $32 billion a year in federal student loan money. They overcharge students so drastically that even those who graduate are stuck with nearly $40,000 in debt, and they deliver such poor education that graduates can’t get jobs with high-enough wages to repay the loans. David Halprin, author of Stealing America’s Future, calls this predatory educational industry “an immoral enterprise.”
This is Jim Hightower saying... America’s whole approach to ever-higher-priced, higher-education is wrong-headed. We know that college and advanced-skill degrees today are as essential to both individual and national well-being as high school diplomas used to be, so its time to redirect and reinvest in America’s future by making higher education free.

“Non-candidate” campaigns dominate 2016 presidential race

Once upon a time in our Good Ol’ USofA, presidential contenders and their political parties raised the funds needed to make the race. How quaint.
For the 2016 run, thanks to the Supreme Court’s malicious meddling in the democratic process, corporations and billionaires have taken charge of the electoral game. These very special interests, who have their own presidential agenda, now put up the vast majority of funds and run their own private campaigns to elect someone who’ll do their bidding.
So far, of nearly $400 million raised to back candidates of either party in next year’s race, half of the money has come from a pool of only about 400 people – and two-thirds of their cash went, not to candidates, but into corporate-run SuperPACs. For Republicans, 77 percent of the funds have gone to SuperPACs.
The reason is that the Supreme Court decreed in its reckless Citizens United decision that these “non-candidate” campaigns can take unlimited sums of money directly from corporations. Therefore a very few wealthy powers can pour money into these murky political operations and gain unwarranted plutocratic power over the election process. Of the $37 million in the PAC backing Ted Cruz, for example, $36 million was pumped in by only three interests – a New York hedge fund operator, a corporate plunderer living in Puerto Rico, and the owners of a fracking operation who’ve pocketed billions from the explosive use of this destructive drilling technology.
But one of these new players assures us that they’re not buying candidates for corporate and personal gain, but “primarily [for] a love economic freedom.”
This is Jim Hightower saying... Sure, sweetheart – all you want is the “economic freedom” to pollute, defraud, exploit, rob, and otherwise harm anything and anyone standing between you and another dollar in profit.
A Wealthy Few lead in Giving To Campaigns,” New York Times, August 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html?_r=0

Superrich donors turn our democracy into their plutocracy

The problem with the GOP presidential debates is that the wrong people are on stage. Sure, Bush, Cruz, Walker, and gang are the candidates, but the driving forces in this election have names like Mercer, Braman, Hendricks, Fernandez, and Cameron. They are part of a small but powerful coterie of multimillionaire corporate executives and billionaires who fund secretive presidential SuperPACs that can determine who gets nominated. These elephantine funders play politics like some superrich, heavy-betting gamblers play roulette – putting enormous piles of chips on a name in hopes of getting lucky, then cashing in for governmental favors.

Thus, Robert Mercer, chief of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, has already put more than $11 million into Ted Cruz’s SuperPAC; Norman Braman, former owner of the Philadelphia Eagle’s football team, has $5 million down on Marco Rubio; Diane Hendricks, the billionaire owner of a roofing outfit and a staunch anti-worker activist, is betting $5 million on Scott Walker; Mike Fernandez, a billionaire investor in healthcare corporations, has backed Jeb Bush with $3 million; and Ronald Cameron, an Arkansas poultry baron, is into Mike Huckabee for $3 million.
These shadowy SuperPACs amount to exclusive political casinos, with only a handful of million-dollar-plus players dominating each one (including the one behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign). These few people are not merely “big donors”– they are owners, with full access to their candidate and an owner’s prerogative to shape the candidate’s policies and message.

This is Jim Hightower saying... These treacherous few are using their bags of cash to pervert American democracy into rank plutocracy. Why not put them on stage and make each one answer pointed questions about what special favors they’re trying to buy.

A Wealthy Few Lead in Giving To Campaigns,” New York Times, August 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html?_r=0