Destroying Education in the Name of the Free Market

As the families of millions of American high school students have noticed, the cost of a college education is now at the highest that anyone can remember. While loans are within the grasp of many, if not most, to pay for the expense of this education, the cost of paying back these loans often prices students out of jobs in the nonprofit or public service sector.

In the past, there were some programs available for debt relief for those students who become teachers for a given number of years, these programs have been trimmed back, or eliminated entirely, in the pursuit of balancing state budgets.

As the cost of a bachelor's degree climbs to more than $40,000 at many private institutions -- reaching almost to the median family income (approximately $50,000 per year)-- the last best hope for millions of American high school students is our nation's state or local universities. Until the 1970s, a college education at one of the City University of New York schools was entirely free. Even until the 2000s, many state schools charged only nominal tuition (almost always under $10,000). Yet in recent years these institutions have been gutted by governments desperate to cut back on spending and have suffered the efforts of a Republican Party very suddenly (and conveniently) interested in avoiding deficits.

These universities have, by some miracle, managed to keep their tuition rates significantly below those of most private universities (for example, Rutgers University costs less than $12,000 per year whereas the price tag for a year at Carnegie Mellon University is about five times that. Budget cuts, however, remain underway. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), for example, cut $500 million from the New Jersey education budget and his administration furthermore failed to correctly file the papers to win a piece of the $400 million in funding for primary and secondary education from the federal government.

These cuts threaten the ability of state schools to provide a worthwhile higher education to students. Nonetheless, thus far American public universities have managed to survive: the quality education offered at the hundreds of state-run institutions of higher education in the United States remain a testament to the fact that, despite the perennial insistence of the GOP, the private sector is not always capable of providing better services at a lower cost. Schools such as University of California -- Berkeley, Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley Law School), University of California -- Los Angeles, University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, University of Michigan -- Ann Arbor, University of Maryland -- College Park, and a litany of other state schools are all ranked by the US News & World Report as within the top 100, if not top 50, educational institutions in the United States.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

Missing Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say

Reporting from Washington - After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The mystery is a growing embarrassment to the Pentagon, and an irritant to Washington's relations with Baghdad. Iraqi officials are threatening to go to court to reclaim the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, seized Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the United Nations' oil-for-food program.

It's fair to say that Congress, which has already shelled out $61 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for similar reconstruction and development projects in Iraq, is none too thrilled either.

Full Article
Source: Los Angeles Times 

Koch Brothers, Grover Norquist Split On Ethanol Subsidies

WASHINGTON -- Opponents of ethanol subsidies got a boost Monday from Koch Industries as the company announced its opposition to the giveaways on the eve of a major vote in the Senate.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is pushing a vote on an amendment Tuesday that would end ethanol subsidies and eliminate tariffs on foreign supplies of the biofuel. That would allow companies to use sugar-based Brazilian ethanol, which is both cheaper and less environmentally damaging than the domestic corn-based variety.

Ethanol is a key national issue for the GOP because of the importance of Iowa's early caucus to the presidential primary. Former Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-Utah) is skipping the state, he has said, because his opposition to the subsidies is toxic in the state. The issue has split the Republican Party, with free market advocates and deficits hawks pushing for elimination of the subsidies and corn-state politicians fighting back.

The conservative power broker Grover Norquist has battled Coburn, arguing that ending the handouts is equivalent to increasing taxes, meaning that candidates who signed a no-new-taxes pledge would be breaking their word. He has charged that Coburn "lied his way into office."

Norquist has been critical of Coburn and other Republicans who have highlighted the yawning federal deficit, arguing that the focus should be on reducing spending rather than trimming the national debt. He worries that if the American people are forced to choose between the two ways of reducing the deficit -- tax hikes or spending cuts -- they'll eventually pick tax increases.

It is rare for the Kochs to weigh in publicly on specific amendments as they've done in Coburn's case. But it might not be enough to get his amendment over the top. In order to get a vote on it, Coburn pulled a procedural move that irked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who responded by calling on his caucus to oppose the amendment on procedural grounds.

Coburn and Koch Industries have been in discussion about the political issue for several months. But ultimately, it claims, the Koch's commitment to free-market principles overrode the fact that their company benefits from the subsidies.

"Koch Industries has opposed federal mandates and subsidies for decades," the letter to Coburn reads. "Our aim is to create a free market where consumers decide winners and losers based on which products they decide to buy, instead of government picking winners and losers based on which friends or products it chooses to subsidize. One such government intervention is the tax credit that provides about $6 billion each year to blenders of ethanol."

"We hold this position despite the fact that we benefit from these tax credits," the letter points out.

Koch Industries will, however, continue to exploit the credits, if they aren't repealed.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

Bank Of America 'Significantly Hindered' Federal Investigation, U.S. Official Says

NEW YORK -- Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank by assets, "significantly hindered" a federal investigation into the firm's faulty foreclosure practices on potentially billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-backed loans, a federal auditor told an Arizona court.

The bank withheld key documents and data, prevented investigators from interviewing bank employees or asking certain questions, and was slow to provide information, according to a June 1 declaration by William W. Nixon, a fraud examiner and assistant regional inspector general for audit for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general's office.

Due to Bank of America's "reluctance," Nixon resorted to asking the Justice Department to issue so-called civil investigative demands last December to compel testimony, a "less effective" means of carrying out its investigation, Nixon said. His office can't compel testimony on its own.

Bank of America, the largest handler of home loans in the U.S., threw up roadblocks to the investigation, Nixon said, like preventing his team from performing a "walkthrough" of the bank's documents unit.

The bank also failed to fully comply with subpoenas issued by Nixon's team. HUD's internal watchdog issued two subpoenas requesting documents and information, and what was returned was incomplete, had conflicting information, and in some cases, the bank provided excerpts of documents rather than the complete record.

In one instance, Bank of America supplied only a third of what the watchdog requested.

Federal investigators found one bank employee who signed more than 75,000 foreclosure documents over the two-year period. If the employee worked every day during those two years, that amounts to about 103 documents signed per day, or one every five minutes.

Another Bank of America employee was found to have signed nearly 47,000 foreclosure documents over the examined period, which amounts to about 64 documents signed per day, or one every seven minutes.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

Protecting Retirement Funds From Wall Street Speculation

The road to ruinous financialization in the United States commenced in 1963, when the Studebaker auto company went broke and left many workers without pensions. Just over a decade later, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Insurance Security Act, which requires companies that offer retirement plans to manage those investments according to federal standards, ostensibly assuring wage earners of money to live on in retirement. ERISA was originally intended to insure defined benefit pension plans against failure, but by the ’80s these plans had been pre-empted by another well-intentioned government initiative: individual 401(k) plans. As corporate managers and investment firms manipulated these plans for their own gain, retirement savings became the fuel for widespread speculation and financialization of the American economy.

Pension savings, now estimated at nearly $3 trillion, could be invested in companies to finance productive growth, in bonds to fix bridges and build schools, in education loans and environmental protection. Instead, they have become rich fodder for Wall Street money managers. In the past three decades, partly because of this pension wealth, the financial services sector has increased its overall profits from 16 percent of total corporate profits to more than 40 percent.

Rather than distribute this profit to stockholders, financial firms reduced dividend yields from roughly 6 percent to less than 2 percent. Stock turnover accelerated, increasing traders’ commissions at the expense of the investors. Every year hundreds of billions of dollars of pension capital is diverted by senior management to stock buybacks. Dividends are not returned to the economy to fund innovation and growth. Instead they are often used to fund high-risk hedge funds and help private equity companies with their “buy it, strip it, flip it” acquisitions.

Full Article
Source: The Nation 

Around the Globe, US Military Bases Generate Resentment, Not Security

As we debate an exit from Afghanistan, it’s critical that we focus not only on the costs of deploying the current force of more than 100,000 troops, but also on the costs of maintaining permanent bases long after those troops leave.

This is an issue that demands a hard look not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but around the globe—where the US has a veritable empire of bases.

According to the Pentagon, there are approximately 865 US military bases abroad—over 1,000 if new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are included.  The cost?  $102 billion annually—and that doesn’t include the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan bases.

In a must-read article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson points out that these bases “constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country’s territory.”  He notes a “bloated and anachronistic” Cold War-tilt toward Europe, including 227 bases in Germany.

“It makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies,” writes Gusterson.

In a recent Italian documentary Standing Army, the late author and Nation contributor Chalmers Johnson says, “The unit of empire in the classic European empires was the colony.  The unit for the American empire is not the colony, it’s the military base… Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.  That’s where we are today.”

The bases—isolated from the host communities and, as Gusterson writes, “generating resentment against [their] prostitution, environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism”—face growing opposition from local citizens.

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow Phyllis Bennis says that the Pentagon and military have been brilliant at spreading military production across virtually every Congressional district so that even the most anti-war members of Congress are reluctant to challenge big Defense projects.

“But there’s really no significant constituency for overseas bases because they don’t bring much money in a concentrated way,” says Bennis.  “So in theory it should be easier to mobilize to close them.”  What is new and heartening, according to Bennis, is that “there are now people in countries everywhere that are challenging the US bases and that’s a huge development.”

Full Article
Source: The Nation 

Canadian Drug Policy Coalition head: Ideology has no place

On June 2, the Global Commission on Drug Policy report was released after two years' work, denouncing the "war on drugs" as a failure and recommending political leaders worldwide adopt evidence- and rights-based approaches to drug policy. This is a pan-political group, with left- and right-wing politicians involved. 

Donald MacPherson, the director the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, spoke to rabble.ca about the implications for Canada.

Cathryn Atkinson: Tell me about the Global Commission report.

Donald MacPherson: The Global Commission on Drug Policy launched itself about six months ago in Geneva. They have been working on this report for some time and the main intent of this report is to put forward a sensible, reasonable step forward in drug policy. More importantly it is to demonstrate that significant leaders from around the world are calling for change.

That makes this report powerful. It's certainly a synthesis of some of the better ideas in terms of what are our next steps if we are going to move away from the war on drugs.

CA: Let's talk about the Canadian response. There have been a large group of Canadian NGOs and other groups, over 30, supporting the report. How is it important to this country?

DM: It's particularly interesting timing for us, and I think it's good timing because it is affirming what a lot of people across the country are saying about public health and drug policy and the criminalization of the drug-crime agenda. Even conservatives I know who have no problem with what our Conservative government is doing [in general] really have a problem with the tack that the federal government is taking on drug policy and criminal justice policy.

This report basically shows that the rest of the world and significant leaders in other parts of the world are moving in different directions.

It is timely for us because the Conservative government needs to take a look at what is happening globally and find out where they want to be on these issues. Clearly, the Americans are moving away from the mandatory minimum sentencing policies, prison policies, for non-violent drug offenses. That experiment has been had and it's over. Even the conservatives in the States have been saying this hasn't worked and they need to try something else.

Full Interview
Source: Rabble.ca 

Protesting the coming right-wing storm on Canadian values at the Conservative Party Convention

As Conservative party elites take over Ottawa Convention Centre for the party's national convention this weekend, a coalition of groups and individuals opposing Prime Minister Stephen Harper's agenda marched through the city demonstrating that while the election is over, they are just beginning their fight against the new Tory majority.

With over 40 participating organizations and featuring an address from renegade Senate page Brigitte Depape, the lively Stop Harper rally shut down the streets of the nation's capital on Friday night with a progression that took marchers from downtown's Dudonald Park to the newly renovated convention centre. It included charged speeches and fiery ‘Stop Harper' chants, as well as playful drum circles and even games of jump ropes throughout the city's streets.

The march coincided with Stephen Harper's first major post-election address to the Conservative Party Convention and brought out roughly 300 to 400 people, said organizer Tavia Tegler.

The gathering brought together a diverse cross section of those opposing the new Conservative majority, broadcasting the message that the only way to fight back against the government's policies is to band together and strengthen social movements.

Full Article
Source: Rabble.ca  

Foreign Policy Takes Centre Stage

Nary a word was uttered about Libya or Afghanistan during the election, yet they're set to dominate Canadian politics this summer.

Canada's involvement in the NATO-led mission in Libya is up for debate in the House of Commons tomorrow, even though it's all but guaranteed to get a three-month extension. The Halifax Chronicle Herald's Scott Taylor wonders why we're “helping prop up a corrupt and hated regime against an armed rebellion in Afghanistan, while at the same time assisting armed rebels in their attempt to overthrow a corrupt and hated regime in Libya.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai's cabinet boasts warlords who have likely committed war crimes, while a harsh interpretation of Sharia law dominates the land. The faults of the Afghan regime are many, but Taylor ignores the fact that Karzai never threatened to massacre an entire city, which is why CF-18s continue to drop bombs on Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

Full Article
Source: The Mark 

Former Miss USA, Ralph Nader, Privacy Advocates Fight Full Body Airport Scanners and Invasive Pat-Downs

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to stop Transportation Security Administration’s full body scanning procedures by granting an immediate injunction. The full body scans are not mandatory for all travelers, but those who object are subject to "enhanced" pat-downs, extremely invasive manual checks. Civil rights activists argue these initiatives are inappropriate, ineffective, violate the Constitution, pose health concerns related to radiation exposure, and are insensitive to religious practices. We speak former Miss USA and actress Susie Castillo, who was recently subjected to an enhanced body pat-down and has become a vocal critic of such security procedures. We also speak with Ralph Nader and Amie Stepanovich of EPIC.

Video
Source: Democracy Now!