The college debt crisis is even worse than you think

We tell students they need a bachelor’s degree to get ahead. But for too many, the numbers no longer add up.

By Neil Swidey

IT’S ONE OF THE MOST enduring selling points for the value of higher education: The best route out of poverty is through the college quad. Spend four years in college, and all that book learning, mind opening, and network expanding will help even the lowest-income student jump up several rungs on the economic ladder. Nowhere is that message preached as often or with as much evident authority as in Massachusetts, the nation’s historic capital of private, nonprofit higher education, where the concentration of colleges in some areas is surpassed only by the number of Dunkin’ Donuts franchises.

But just how true is this truism about college lifting low-income students out of their circumstances, Horatio Alger style? In fact, like the actual story of author Horatio Alger, who was born into a well-established family and graduated from Harvard, there’s more myth than truth. That’s been especially so in recent years, as nonselective private colleges from around the region have increasingly filled their freshman classes with low-income students — often the first generation in their families to go to college — from Boston and other urban areas. Quite a few of these small schools are former junior colleges and women’s colleges with rich histories of opening doors to students traditionally shut out from higher education, an admirable pursuit that officials refer to as “access.” Many of the colleges are also in tough financial straits, struggling with rising costs, stunted endowments, and declining enrollments.

Embodied by Sanders and Corbyn, Resistance to Neoliberalism Won't Melt Away

Neither movement is just about one man. They’re a reflection of millions of people wanting to move beyond neoliberalism

by Diane Abbott

I spent last week at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia. In the early hours of the first day of the convention, there was a spectacular thunderstorm with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. If you were a Bernie Sanders supporter and of a religious bent, you might well have wondered whether it was God herself making clear her displeasure at the prospect of the Democratic party making Hillary Clinton its presidential nominee.

Just one subject was on most people’s lips – the Sanders delegates and how they could be controlled. Many of the people I met were interested in Jeremy Corbyn, who they saw as Britain’s answer to Sanders.

How ‘Competitiveness’ Became One of the Great Unquestioned Virtues of Contemporary Culture

How did mounting inequality succeed in proving culturally and politically attractive for as long as it did?

Will Davies

Widening economic inequality is the academic topic du jour, but the trend of growing wealth and income disparity has been underway for several decades. How did mounting inequality succeed in proving culturally and politically attractive for as long as it did?

The years since the banking meltdown of 2008 have witnessed a dawning awareness, that our model of capitalism is not simply producing widening inequality, but is apparently governed by the interests of a tiny minority of the population. The post-crisis period has spawned its own sociological category – ‘the 1%’ – and recently delivered its first work of grand economic theory, in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, a book dedicated to understanding why inequality keeps on growing.

A Georgia town is sending police to black residents’ homes to challenge their voting rights

Brad Reed

Jim Crow laws have been off the books for years, but that hasn’t stopped individual states and cities from coming up with new ways to depress minority voter turnout.

Last week, for instance, a U.S. appeals court struck down a North Carolina voter ID law that it said was specifically designed to lower turnout among black voters. And now the New York Times is reporting that a town in Georgia is using its police department to challenge the rights of its black residents to vote.

Dean Baker: Don't believe Wall Street's scare stories about a financial transactions tax

Thanks in large part to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party recently added a financial transactions tax to its platform. In his run for the presidential nomination, Sanders had promoted the idea of an FTT — a small sales tax on the purchase of stocks, bonds or other financial assets — as a way to finance free college for everyone, with money left over for infrastructure and other important needs. The idea has currency beyond the platform, too: Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) recently reintroduced an earlier proposal for a tax of 3 cents on every 100 dollars on most financial transactions.

Talk of FTTs scares the financial industry: They would significantly reduce the industry’s revenue and profits. As soon as anyone starts taking FTTs seriously, the industry immediately begins issuing dire warnings — which, unsurprisingly, almost always amount to nonsense.

Paul Krugman: Worthy of Our Contempt

Donald Trump said some more disgusting things over the weekend. If this surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. Also, don’t be surprised if a majority of Republicans approve of his attack on the parents of a dead war hero. After all, a YouGov survey found that 61 percent of Republicans support his call for Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton.

But this isn’t a column about Mr. Trump and the people who are O.K. with anything he says or does. It is, instead, about Republicans — probably a minority within the party, but a substantial one — who aren’t like that. These are people who aren’t racists, respect patriots even if they’re Muslim, believe that America should honor its international commitments, and in general sound like normal members of a normal political party.

The Fallacy of ‘Regime Change’ Strategies

“Regime change” or destabilizing sanctions are Official Washington’s policy options of choice in dealing with disfavored nations, but these aggressive strategies have proved harmful and counterproductive, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

By Paul R. Pillar

Many variables are involved in the messy predicaments in the Middle East, but one way of framing the history and issues of U.S. policy toward the region is in terms of the approaches that have been taken toward so-called rogue regimes. That term, one should hasten to add, obscures more than it enlightens. But it has been in general use for a long time. Take it as shorthand to refer to regimes that have come to be considered especially troublesome and are subjected to some degree of ostracism and punishment.

Three basic approaches are available in formulating policy toward such a regime: (1) keep ostracizing and punishing it in perpetuity; (2) try to change the regime; or (3) negotiate and do business with it, to constrain it and to influence its actions. There are some contradictions between the approaches. Any regime that is led to believe that it is going to be overturned anyway, or that it will be perpetually punished anyway, lacks incentive to make concessions in a negotiation.

One Democratic Convention Speech Nailed The Progressive Vision

Isaiah J. Poole

When Rev. William Barber, best known in progressive circles as the leader of the Moral Mondays protests against the right-wing governor and legislature in North Carolina, was brought to the stage at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, there was cheering from the North Carolina delegation but polite applause from the rest the hall. They did not know who Barber was, and they did not know what was coming.

Ten minutes later, when Barber finished his address, the entire convention hall was on its feet.

“I come before you tonight as a preacher,” he began, and from that moment Barber took the convention delegates through the convergence of progressive populism and “faith and morality.”

'Disappointed' in Obama, Sanders Calls on Top Dems to Drop Lame Duck TPP Push

TPP "will cost American jobs, harm the environment, increase the cost of prescription drugs, and threaten our ability to protect public health"

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Hillary Clinton may not have heeded progressives' call to clearly say she'll urge the White House and her fellow party members to oppose a "lame-duck" vote on the Trans Pacific Partnership, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has done just that, calling on Democratic Congressional leadership to publicly oppose a post-Election Day vote on the "job-killing trade deal."

Sanders' statement, issued Friday, comes as the Obama administration continues its push to get the TPP passed this year.

Paul Krugman: Who Loves America?

It has been quite a week in politics.

On one side, the Democratic National Convention was very much a celebration of America. On the other side, the Republican nominee for president, pressed on the obvious support he is getting from Vladimir Putin, once again praised Mr. Putin’s leadership, suggested that he is O.K. with Russian aggression in Crimea, and urged the Russians to engage in espionage on his behalf. And no, it wasn’t a joke.

I know that some Republicans feel as if they’ve fallen through the looking glass. After all, usually they’re the ones chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” And haven’t they spent years suggesting that Barack and Michelle Obama hate America, and may even support the nation’s enemies? How did Democrats end up looking like the patriots here?

Greenwald Explains What Out-of-Touch Media Doesn't Get About Trump, Russia, and US Electorate

'People have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can't imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo'

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

Donald Trump poses "extreme dangers" to the United States and the world, journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald says in a new interview published at Slate.

But to stop the GOP presidential nominee from getting elected, "U.S. media and U.S. elites" must take a lesson from the recent Brexit debacle, he warns—and bending over backwards to link Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't the right approach.

"U.K. elites were uniform, uniform, in their contempt for the Brexit case, other than the right-wing Murdochian tabloids," Greenwald told Slate contributor Isaac Chotiner by phone.

FLASHBACK: When Millions of Lost Bush White House Emails (From Private Accounts) Triggered a Media Shrug

Millions of missing White House emails that were sought in connection to a congressional investigation.

By Eric Boehlert / Media Matters

Even for a Republican White House that was badly stumbling through George W. Bush's sixth year in office, the revelation on April 12, 2007, was shocking. Responding to congressional demands for emails in connection with its investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the White House announced that as many as five million emails, covering a two-year span, had been lost.

The emails had been run through private accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee and were only supposed to be used for dealing with non-administration political campaign work to avoid violating ethics laws. Yet congressional investigators already had evidence private emails had been used for government business, including to discuss the firing of one of the U.S. attorneys. The RNC accounts were used by 22 White House staffers, including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who reportedly used his RNC email for 95 percent of his communications.

Koch's Latest Propaganda Disaster: Another Academic Sell-Out Sets Off Controversy With Remarks

Charles Koch's incestuous academic network serves only to promote his brand of tax-slashing, regulation-killing economics.

By Alex Kotch

Yet another controversy is boiling at a Charles Koch-funded university project to promote an extreme economic agenda, this time at Troy University in Alabama. The libertarian billionaire, who is known for his powerful, conservative political donor network, has led a movement to create academic centers on college and university campuses that promote his brand of tax-slashing, regulation-killing economics, benefiting his massive industrial corporation’s bottom line.

Since 1980, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) has granted $200 million to hundreds of colleges and universities, often to establish free-market academic centers and in other cases funding professors, doctoral students and free-market courses within established programs. From 2005 to 2014, Koch family foundations, led by CKF, donated nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities, as Facing South reported.

ALEC 2016 Agenda Boosts Charters, Coal and Other Corporate Funders

By Jessica Mason and Lisa Graves, PR Watch | News Analysis

The American Legislative Exchange Council will push bills to protect failing charter schools, silence political speech, and obstruct environmental protections in the ALEC 2016 agenda introduced at its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week.

ALEC faces renewed public attention as it gears up for the annual meeting, where corporate lobbyists sit side-by-side with state legislators in luxury hotels to vote as equals on "model bills" that then get pushed to become law in states across the country.

Want to Stop Gentrification? Start a Union.

Like labor unions, neighborhood unions could help residents bargain collectively for affordable housing, housing security, protections for local businesses, and community reconciliation.

By Brandon Ward

Historical communities around the nation are being threatened by gentrification. Neighborhoods that have served as spaces for social advancement and vibrant local cultures for generations are under threat as they become targets for gold-digging investors and developers.

I live in Hampden, one of many communities in Baltimore being threatened by gentrification.

Forbes ranked Hampden as America’s 15th most hipster neighborhood. Known for its walkability, coffee shops, local food trucks, and an assortment of local restaurants and bars, Hampden has a thriving local economy. These small shops and local businesses have been around for decades and helped establish the culture and generate wealth within the neighborhood.

Turbo-Capitalism Will Wreck Us, Unless Hillary Moves Faster

Breaking the glass ceiling won't fix the walls and foundation.

By Jim Sleeper

In a prescient, darkly prophetic, lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2007, the writer Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of Whittaker Chambers and, soon, of William F. Buckley, Jr., put his finger on American conservatism's original sin: It can’t or won’t reconcile its sincere yearnings for an ordered, republican liberty, rooted in civic virtues and national sovereignty, with its devotion to almost every whim and riptide of a new capitalism that's destroying the very virtues and sovereignty conservatives cherish.

"You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture," Tanenhaus said, adding that capitalism can invigorate a society only if it’s answerable to republican vigilance against excessive profit-maximizing as well against excessive government.

How climate change is rapidly taking the planet apart

Writing up articles on climate change is difficult these days. Last week alone, 46 new papers and reports were published. I am certain that there are many more. The figure only refers to the sources I usually consult. I try to read all abstracts and all articles I find interesting, but sometimes I shy away from it: it is just too depressing. As, for example, Camille Parmesan (Nobel prize laureate together with Al Gore) and Jason Box said on several occasions, many climate scientists suffer from some sort of mood imbalance or mild or serious depression. It is easy to understand why: we see the climate change taking the planet apart right in front of our eyes. We also clearly see, right in front of us, what urgently needs to done to stave off global disaster on an unprecedented scale. We need carbon taxes and the reconversion of industry and energy towards zero CO2 emissions systems. This route is without any doubt technically and economically feasible, but politically it seems to be permanently locked. If we do not unlock it, the future looks bleak, not to say hopeless, for humankind.

We Must Reject Economic Cannibalism

By John Perkins

"What can I do to fix a broken global economy?" It's a question I've been asked a lot these past few months as I've crisscrossed the US speaking at TED venues, music concerts, the World Affairs Council, bookstores, on radio and TV shows, and at a variety of other forums.

During this election year it is important to recognize that corporations pretty much run the world. Despite the outcome of the elections, they will continue to do so -- at least until we organize and change the rules that have created the dominant neoliberal system.

We all support corporations. We buy from them, work for them, manage them, invest in them, and help them with our tax dollars.

Chomsky: America Is on the Decline: Guess Who's to Blame?

Noam Chomsky wants to make America great again, but you’ll never believe who he thinks will save it.

By Alexandra Rosenmann

Noam Chomsky has some tough love for America.

"The United States is a victim of self-inflicted wounds which are significantly harming the economy and society in many ways," Chomsky recently stated, though he also admitted that, "even with the neoliberal policies, since President Reagan and comparable to Europe, the U.S. remains, in realistic terms, the richest country in the world and has enormous advantages. Still a position of overwhelming power, but “not as what it was, in particular, with regard to Latin America.”

But Chomsky remains hopeful both for Latin America and the U.S.

Paul Krugman: Delusions of Chaos

Last year there were 352 murders in New York City. This was a bit higher than the number in 2014, but far below the 2245 murders that took place in 1990, the city’s worst year. In fact, as measured by the murder rate, New York is now basically as safe as it has ever been, going all the way back to the 19th century.

National crime statistics, and numbers for all violent crimes, paint an only slightly less cheerful picture. And it’s not just a matter of numbers; our big cities look and feel far safer than they did a generation ago, because they are. People of a certain age always have the sense that America isn’t the country they remember from their youth, and in this case they’re right — it has gotten much better.

The far-right’s 50-year project to transform American values with a clandestine ‘counterrevolution’

History News Network

The current U.S. presidential election cycle may seem over the top. But in one important way, it is no different than any other over the past several decades. Since the 1970s, presidential candidates running under the Republican ticket have successively shifted further and further to the political right. How many times have we heard—or said—that George W. Bush made Richard Nixon look like a liberal?

The rightward political shift is no accident. Since the end of World War II, far-right conservatives and libertarians have patiently laid the groundwork for a national climate receptive to their ideals of weak government and a strong corporate presence.

Oil Lobby Paid Washington Post and Atlantic to Host Climate-Change Deniers at RNC

Alex Emmons

At the award-winning seafood restaurant in downtown Cleveland that The Atlantic rented out for the entire four-day Republican National Convention, GOP Rep. Bill Johnson turned to me and explained that solar panels are not a viable energy source because “the sun goes down.”

Johnson had just stepped off the stage where he was one of the two featured guests speaking at The Atlantic’s “cocktail caucus,” where restaurant staff served complimentary wine, cocktails, and “seafood towers” of shrimp, crab cakes, oysters, and mussels to delegates, guests, reporters and, of course, the people paying the bills.

How Individualist Economics Are Causing Planetary Eco-Collapse

By Richard Smith

While capitalism has brought unprecedented development, this same motor of development is now driving us towards ecological collapse, threatening to doom us all. Adam Smith's capitalist economics can offer no solution to the crisis because the crisis is the product of the same dynamic of competition-driven production for market that generates the ever-greater accumulation of wealth and consumption that Smithian economists celebrate. In his 1996 book The Future of Capitalism, Lester Thurow lucidly captured the socially suicidal aggregate impact of individualistic economic decision-making:

"Nowhere is capitalism's time horizon problem more acute than in the area of global environmentalism... What should a capitalistic society do about long-run environmental problems such as global warming or ozone depletion?... Using capitalist decision rules, the answer to what should be done today to prevent such problems is very clear -- do nothing. However large the negative effects fifty to one hundred years from now might be, their current discounted net present value is zero. If the current value of the future negative consequences is zero, then nothing should be spent today to prevent those distant problems from emerging. But if the negative effects are very large fifty to one hundred years from now, by then it will be too late to do anything to make the situation any better, since anything done at that time could only improve the situation another fifty to one hundred years into the future. So being good capitalists, those who live in the future, no matter how bad their problems are, will also decide to do nothing. Eventually a generation will arrive which cannot survive in the earth's altered environment, but by then it will be too late for them to do anything to prevent their own extinction. Each generation makes good capitalist decisions, yet the net effect is collective social suicide."

Elizabeth Warren Opens Broad Attack Against Rent-Seeking Oligopolists Like Amazon, Apple, Google, Walmart, Comcast

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Yves Smith

While the media has been obsessed with Elizabeth Warren acting as the new heavy in the Clinton campaign against Donald Trump, it has curiously neglected a front she and other progressives are opening against powerful companies that are strong backers of the Clinton presidential bid. She has called out some of the most powerful companies in America as having too much economic power and has called for them to reined in.

At a minimum, this suggests that Warren has not fallen into Clinton’s orbit, nor is operating under a delusion as far as the likelihood of her becoming Vice President is concerned, despite some unseemly behavior, like at one point stating her willingness to take the job. Warren and Trump have a strong mutual antipathy. Warren will be able to play a more influential role in a Clinton administration than in a Trump administration whether she is offered a post or not.

How Billionaires Are Successfully Fooling Us Into Destroying Public Education—and Why Privatization Is a Terrible Idea

The billionaire-backed privatization movement is stealthily advancing an undemocratic agenda, cloaked in deceptive rhetoric, that the public is not aware of and does not understand.

By Diane Ravitch

Something unprecedented is happening to American public education. A powerful, well-funded, well-organized movement is seeking to privatize significant numbers of public schools and destroy the teaching profession. This movement is not a conspiracy; it operates in the open. But its goals are masked by deceptive rhetoric. It calls itself a “reform” movement, but its true goal is privatization.

This movement has had strange bedfellows. Some of its funders and promoters on the far right of the political spectrum are motivated by ideological contempt for the public sector; others earnestly believe they are providing better choices for poor children “trapped in failing schools.” Still others believe that elected local school boards are incompetent and should be replaced by private management, or that the private sector is inherently more innovative and effective than the public sector. And some are motivated by greed, while others are motivated by religious conviction. These strange bedfellows have included the US Department of Education (during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama); major foundations and think tanks, both conservative and centrist; billionaires committed to free-market solutions—and certain they know what is best because they are so rich; entrepreneurs hoping to make money from school privatization or by selling technology to replace teachers; the far-right American Legisla­tive Exchange Council (ALEC), which has drafted model legislation to promote corporate interests and to expand the privatization of almost all government services, including education; and numerous governors and legislators (mostly but not exclusively Republicans) who want schools to operate in a free-market system of school choice.

The Republicans' Platform Eviscerates Workers’ Rights

A government for the people?

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The Republican Party's official 2016 platform, released this week, proudly states “the greatest asset of the American economy is the hard working American.”

The writers must have a twisted sense of humor.

In a not particularly unexpected move, the party platform eviscerates the “hard working American,” denying workers of their right to unionize while targeting their most vulnerable communities.

What’s Taking Little Rock Back To Its Segregated Past?

Jeff Bryant

Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. But the story of Little Rock and segregation badly needs updating.

Central High became one of the first practical tests of principles established in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned racially separate public schools. When nine black students showed up for opening day of the historically all-white school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent them from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by calling in federal troops to escort the students into the school, and Faubus eventually backed down.

Regulating Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Could Improve the Health of the Next Generation

By Christina Rudén and Laura Vandenberg, Environmental Health News | Op-Ed

With more than 100,000 chemicals on the global market, it is a tremendous challenge to identify those that might cause harm to humans or wildlife. One class of chemicals, endocrine disruptors (chemicals that interfere with natural hormones), is receiving significant attention in the United States, European Union, and elsewhere.

Expert panels from the United Nations Environment Programme and World Health Organization, the Endocrine Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and others have concluded that the evidence linking endocrine disrupting chemicals to human diseases is strong.

John Dewey Was Right: American Politics Is Merely the Shadow Cast by Big Business

by Jake Johnson

Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, the American philosopher John Dewey understood deeply the need for a new political order.

The destitution brought about by the crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic meltdown were, Dewey thought, the predictable consequences of an economy — and a political system — controlled by, and dedicated to the needs of, large corporations.

Dewey is seldom remembered as a radical, but, in an essay published in 1931, he argued that social change can only be brought about by changing the fundamental structure of the political order — refurbishing the exterior would always, Dewey argued, be insufficient.