News & Articles

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.”
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.

It’s time to free students from higher-ed debt

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.”
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.

Battling the forces of inequality in Grand Rapids

“Inequality” is not a condition. It’s a creation. Inequality is produced by thousands of decisions deliberately made by bosses, bankers, and big shots to siphon money and power from the many to the few.
We see Wall Street and Washington doing this to us, but the widening and deepening chasm of inequality in America is also the product of decisions that local elites are making every day. Take Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city largely run by a few billionaire families sharing an entrenched laissez-faire ideology. They want no heavy-handed government policies… unless you’re poor or working class.
Thus, the city powers who find it unconscionable to hike taxes on the rich, recently socked low income bus riders with a 17 percent jump in fares. For the 27 percent of people in Grand Rapids who live below the poverty line, that’s a serious chunk of change siphoned right out of their pockets.
Then, the board of directors of the city’s transit agency slipped a siphon tube into the wallets of their own drivers and mechanics, arbitrarily terminating their pensions. Adding a crude insult to injury, the board simultaneously gave a pay raise to the transit boss – literally stealing from workers to lift the CEO’s salary above $200,000 a year.
When the workers, who’re members of the Amalgamated Transit Union, began leafleting bus riders to oppose the fare hike and pension theft, the arrogant boss and autocratic board threatened to arrest and fire them!
Luckily, even in Grand Rapids, it’s still legal to exercise your First Amendment rights, so the union won an injunction against this repression. Better yet, the attempted siphoning of money and power has rallied community groups, students, bus riders, and others into a grassroots movement to stop widening the inequality gap and start bridging it.

How wacky are America’s plutocratic billionaires? Meet Tom Perkins

You know your presidential campaign is in a heap of hurt when you need Tom Perkins to defend your “abilities, intellect, and talent.”
But there Perkins was in the New York Times recently, having bought a full-page ad attesting to the presidential worthiness of Carly Fiorina – one of the gaggle of 17 GOP seekers of the White House. Fiorina is best known for being dumped as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, having driven its stock price into the ditch and having fired 30,000 workers. She had recently been the subject of a Times article about her “not so sterling” corporate leadership, so she did indeed need an emergency buff-up on her image.
But by Tom Perkins? That’s like asking Donnie Trump to redo your hair!
Perkins, a billionaire venture capital huckster, was an unknown until he burst upon the American public early last year with a loud, self-pitying whine. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, poor Tom wailed about “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.” Moving from merely crotchety to paranoid nuttiness, Perkins blathered that the “war on the American one percent” is like Nazi Germany’s “war on its one percent, namely its Jews.”
He was, of course, roundly ridiculed for wailing that billionaires like him are “victims,” and he was widely denounced for comparing criticism of the wealthy to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. But even public humiliation couldn’t cure his malignant narcissism, so he was soon back in the news with “The Tom Perkins System” to relieve the plight of the put-upon rich. Voting, he explained, should be like owning stock in a corporation, with rich taxpayers getting more votes: “You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes,” says Tom.
Why would Carly Fiorina want a public testimonial to her competence from a wacko plutocrat like Perkins?