“MBA And Law Degree”: Rick Santorum Is A “Snob” By His Own Definition
So Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Barack Obama, and a whole bunch of other people in politics want to be president.
What a bunch of snobs.
That is, of course, if we use Santorum’s definition, which seems oddly to equate the quest for success with snobbery. Santorum called Obama a “snob” for encouraging young people to go to college, which is pretty much the opposite of what most parents say to their kids. It’s especially odd when we consider that Santorum has his MBA and law degree, and is encouraging his own children to go to college. And as for Santorum’s claim that all Obama wants is for young people to be recreated in his image by liberal college professors ready to indoctrinate them, is that how Santorum explains Harvard Law and Business grad Romney? With an estimated wealth of $250 million and a wife who, the candidate disclosed recently drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” Romney’s not exactly from the ‘hood.
Snobbery isn’t defined by inclusion. It’s defined by willful exclusion. Wanting more people to attend college isn’t snobbery; it’s advocating a route that statistically puts the individual in a place of higher wealth and lower unemployment. Refusing to talk to someone at the PTA meeting who didn’t go to college is snobbery. Refusing to associate with people simply because they don’t have money or fancy cars is snobbery. It may be more than that, of course. It may just be that people tend to hang around people from similar backgrounds. But encouraging someone to seek higher education isn’t snobbery at all. It’s the opposite.
Santorum is correct if he was saying that four-year colleges aren’t for everyone. Not everyone has the interest or the intellect to attend such institutions, and the world indeed needs laborers, artists, performers, and technicians who can do their work well with other kinds of training. Community colleges in particular provide critical education for people not suited to four-year school, and they have the added advantage of training people for jobs that for the most part can’t be outsourced. As Rep. Barney Frank once astutely observed, “You can’t stick a needle in somebody’s ass from Mumbai.”
But what’s really happening on the campaign trail is the tired and unbelievably hypocritical effort to seek the snobbiest job in America by demonizing parts of the electorate as “snobs.” And where does the concern for the non-snobby among us go after the campaign? Candidates may tout the value of “Joe The Plumber,” but they let guys like “Sheldon The Las Vegas Casino Billionaire” bankroll their campaign through unlimited super PAC donations. All the candidates have at least one million-dollar donor helping out. Santorum, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports, just got $1 million from Louisiana businessman William Dore; Foster Friess has also been dumping cash into the Red, White and Blue Fund for the former Pennsylvania senator. If Santorum wins the White House, who will guide his decisions—Joe the Unsnobby, or the billionaires who paid for his campaign?
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, February 28, 2012
“Fictionalized History”: Steer Clear Of Newt’s Courses
Newt Gingrich raised some eyebrows recently when he said he intends, if elected president, to teach an online course. It’s worth pausing to appreciate the fact that Gingrich’s desire to teach while holding public office isn’t new.
In the 1990s, Gingrich taught “Renewing American Civilization” at Kennesaw State College in Georgia. The course became infamous because it was at the heart of a congressional ethics investigation that led to severe penalties for the disgraced former Speaker. But back in 1995, before the ethics scandal broke in earnest, the Washington Monthly ran a piece by Allan Lichtman that scrutinized Gingrich’s skills as a history professor.
Wouldn’t you know it, Gingrich had a little trouble keeping his facts straight here, too. He taught what Lichtman described as “fictionalized history.”
The thesis of Gingrich’s course is that American history was an uninterrupted continuity of opportunity and progress from colonial times until what he calls the “breakdown” of 1965. If you read the papers, you know what comes next: That’s when the elite liberal state, aided by the counterculture, introduced the infections of dependency, bureaucracy, and failure. He’s teaching the course in part to balance out the liberal’s view of the world. Did you know, for example, that Thomas Edison “is almost never studied in the counterculture because all his values are exactly wrong? He was successful, and he was very work-oriented, he was highly creative.” […]
Gingrich’s historical selectivity and outright errors are, well, revealing. He manages to get through the entire Civil War without ever mentioning slavery. Of the Declaration of Independence, he says “They originally wrote, ‘We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.”’ Property? John Locke, yes. The Declaration of Independence, never.
Not surprisingly, much of Gingrich’s course is preoccupied with the history of the welfare state-the “actively destructive” welfare state, that is. He doesn’t acknowledge any of the good that government has done over the past 30 years, when federal investments in education, electrification, research, and facilities built Gingrich’s modern South.
If Freddie Mac paid Gingrich $1.8 million for to take advantage of his expertise as a “historian,” I’m afraid the mortgage giant paid too much.
If students paid anything at all to take one of one Gingrich’s courses, I’m afraid they were charged too much, too.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, November 28, 2011
Losing The Future: GOP Hostility Towards Student Aid Intensifies
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to eliminate the federal student loan program. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich believes student loans are a “Ponzi scheme,” which really doesn’t make any sense at all.
And Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain added his name to the list of GOP leaders who no longer want the federal government to help young people pay for higher education.
Speaking by satellite to a New York education forum sponsored by The College Board, a membership association of colleges that administers standardized tests like the SAT, Cain proposed local avenues to replace existing federal tuition aid structure.
“I believe that if a state wants to help with college education, that they should do that,” he said from Arkansas, where he is on a campaign swing. “Secondly, you have people living within communities within states that are willing to help fund those kinds of programs. So I do not believe that it is the responsibility of the federal government to help fund a college education because herein, our resources are limited and I believe that the best solution is the one closest to the problem. The people within the state, the people within the communities, ultimately, I believe, are the ones who have that responsibility.”
It’s not just presidential candidates. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) last week told voters the Pell Grant program is “unsustainable” (it’s actually sustainable with some sensible reforms, making Paul’s drive to gut the program unnecessary*) and that he was outraged that the Obama administration “confiscated the private student loan industry” (that never happened).
As a factual matter, Ryan has no idea what he’s talking about, and Cain’s idea about shifting all college aid responsibilities to states won’t work. But even putting these pesky details aside, why is it Republicans are so eager to make it harder for young people to further their education?
College tuition costs are soaring to the point of being “out of control.” Young people are entering the workforce shouldering $1 trillion in student-loan debt. Given global competition and the need for the most educated workforce the nation can muster, policymakers should be making every effort to make higher ed more accessible, not less, at costs that are more affordable, not less.
And yet, here we are, with national Republican figures cutting funding for student loans, pushing for the elimination of student grants, and in the case of some GOP presidential candidates, calling for the end of federal student assistance altogether.
Talk about losing the future….
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 28, 2011
Social Inequality: The Paradox Of The New Elite
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
The United States prides itself on the belief that “anyone can be president,” and what better example than Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white American mother — neither of them rich.
And yet more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four presidencies. Thus we have become both more inclusive and more elitist.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Other nations seem to face the same challenge: either inclusive, or economically just. Europe has maintained much more economic equality but is struggling greatly with inclusiveness and discrimination, and is far less open to minorities than is the United States.
European countries have done a better job of protecting workers’ salaries and rights but have been reluctant to extend the benefits of their generous welfare state to new immigrants who look and act differently from them. Could America’s lost enthusiasm for income redistribution and progressive taxation be in part a reaction to sharing resources with traditionally excluded groups?
“I do think there is a trade-off between inclusion and equality,” said Gary Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel laureate. “I think if you are a German worker you are better off than your American equivalent, but if you are an immigrant, you are better off in the U.S.”
Professor Becker, a celebrated free-market conservative, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation (and first book, “The Economics of Discrimination”) to demonstrate that racial discrimination was economically inefficient. American business leaders seem to have learned that there is no money to be made in exclusion: bringing in each new group has simply created new consumers to court. If you can capture nearly three-quarters of the economy’s growth — as the top 1 percent did between 2002 and 2006 — it may not be worth worrying about gay marriage or skin color.
“I think we have become more meritocratic — educational attainment has become increasingly predictive of economic success,” Professor Becker said. But with educational attainment going increasingly to the children of the affluent and educated, we appear to be developing a self-perpetuating elite that reaps a greater and greater share of financial rewards. It is a hard-working elite, and more diverse than the old white male Anglo-Saxon establishment — but nonetheless claims a larger share of the national income than was the case 50 years ago, when blacks, Jews and women were largely shut out of powerful institutions.
Inequality and inclusion are both as American as apple pie, says Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The Chosen,” about the history of admission to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. “I don’t think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition,” he says. “As long as everyone has a chance to compete, we shouldn’t worry about equality. Equality of condition is seen as undesirable, even un-American.”
The long history of racial discrimination represented an embarrassing contradiction — and a serious threat — to our national story of equal opportunity. With Jim Crow laws firmly in place it was hard to seriously argue that everyone had an equal chance. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were able to use this tradition to draw support to their causes. “Given our culture of equality of opportunity, these kinds of rights-based arguments are almost impossible to refute,” Professor Karabel said. “Even in today’s conservative political climate, opponents of gay rights are losing ground.”
The removal of traditional barriers opened up the American system. In 1951 blacks made up less than 1 percent of the students at America’s Ivy League colleges. Today they make up about 8 percent. At the same time, America’s elite universities are increasingly the provinces of the well-to-do. “Looking at the data, you see that the freshman class of our top colleges are more and more made up of the children of upper- and upper-middle-class families,” said Thomas J. Espenshade of Princeton, a sociologist.
Even the minority students are more affluent, he noted; many of them are of mixed race, or the children of immigrants or those who benefited from affirmative action.
Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia and the author of “Privilege,” a book about St. Paul’s, the prep school, agreed that there had been a change in the composition of the elite. “Who is at elite schools seems to have shifted,” he said. “But the elite seem to have a firmer and firmer hold on our nation’s wealth and power.”
Still the relatively painless movement toward greater diversity should not be dismissed as mere window dressing.
“After the immigration reform of 1965, this country went from being the United States of Europe to being the United States of the World. All with virtually no violence and comparatively little trauma,” Professor Karabel said. This is no small thing, particularly when you compare it to the trauma experienced by many European societies in absorbing much lower percentages of foreign-born citizens, few of whom have penetrated their countries’ elites.
Moreover, inequality has grown partly for reasons that have little or nothing to do with inclusion. Almost all advanced industrial societies — even Sweden — have become more unequal. But the United States has become considerably more unequal. In Europe, the rights of labor have remained more central, while the United States has seen the rise of identity politics.
“There is much less class-based organization in the U.S,” said Professor Karabel. “Race, gender and sexual orientation became the salient cleavages of American political life. And if you look at it — blacks, Hispanics and women have gained somewhat relative to the population as a whole, but labor as a category has lost ground. The groups that mobilized — blacks, Hispanics, women — made gains. But white male workers, who demobilized politically, lost ground.”
One of the groups to become mobilized in response to the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was the rich. Think tanks dedicated to defending the free-enterprise system — such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation — were born in this period. And it is not an accident that the right-wing advocate Glenn Beck held a national rally on the anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Republicans now defend tax cuts for the richest 2 percent using arguments and language from the civil rights movements: insisting that excluding the richest earners is unfair.
Removing the most blatant forms of discrimination, ironically, made it easier to justify keeping whatever rewards you could obtain through the new, supposedly more meritocratic system. “Greater inclusiveness was a precondition for greater economic stratification,” said Professor Karabel. “It strengthened the system, reinvigorated its ideology — it is much easier to defend gains that appear to be earned through merit. In a meritocracy, inequality becomes much more acceptable.”
The term “meritocracy” — now almost universally used as a term of praise — was actually coined as a pejorative term, appearing for the first time in 1958, in the title of a satirical dystopian novel, “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” by the British Labour Party leader Michael Young. He warned against the creation of a new technocratic elite in which the selection of the few would lead to the abandonment of the many, a new elite whose privileges were even more crushing and fiercely defended because they appeared to be entirely merited.
Of the European countries, Britain’s politics of inequality and inclusion most resemble those of the United States. Even as inequality has grown considerably, the British sense of economic class has diminished. As recently as 1988, some 67 percent of British citizens proudly identified themselves as working class. Now only 24 percent do. Almost everybody below the Queen and above the poverty line considers himself or herself “middle class.”
Germany still has robust protections for its workers and one of the healthiest economies in Europe. Children at age 10 are placed on different tracks, some leading to university and others to vocational school — a closing off of opportunity that Americans would find intolerable. But it is uncontroversial because those attending vocational school often earn as much as those who attend university.
In France, it is illegal for the government to collect information on people on the basis of race. And yet millions of immigrants — and the children and grandchildren of immigrants — fester in slums.
In the United States, the stratification of wealth followed several decades where economic equality was strong. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed underscored the excesses of the roaring ’20s and ushered in an era in which the political climate favored labor unions, progressive taxation and social programs aimed at reducing poverty.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the income of the less affluent Americans grew more quickly than that of their wealthier neighbors, and the richest 1 percent saw its share of the national income shrink to 8.9 percent in the mid-1970s, from 23.9 percent in 1928. That share is now back up to more than 20 percent, its level before the Depression.
Inequality has traditionally been acceptable to Americans if accompanied by mobility. But most recent studies of economic mobility indicate that it is getting even harder for people to jump from one economic class to another in the United States, harder to join the elite. While Americans are used to considering equal opportunity and equality of condition as separate issues, they may need to reconsider. In an era in which money translates into political power, there is a growing feeling, on both left and right, that special interests have their way in Washington. There is growing anger, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, that the current system is stacked against ordinary citizens. Suddenly, as in the 1930s, the issue of economic equality is back in play.
By: Alexander Stille, The New York Times Sunday Review, October 22, 2011
Calling All Progressive Democrats: A Time To Fight
Should you find your enthusiasm for activist politics waning, Robert Reich has a Monday morning energizer in his latest blog entry “Don’t Be Silenced,” via RSN:
We’re on the cusp of the 2012 election. What will it be about? It seems reasonably certain President Obama will be confronted by a putative Republican candidate who:Believes corporations are people, wants to cut the top corporate rate to 25% (from the current 35%) and no longer require they pay tax on foreign income, who will eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, raise the retirement age for Social Security and turn Medicaid into block grants to states, seek a balanced-budged amendment to the Constitution, require any regulatory agency issuing a new regulation repeal another regulation of equal cost (regardless of the benefits), and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
Or one who:
Believes the Federal Reserve is treasonous when it expands the money supply, doubts human beings evolved from more primitive forms of life, seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and shift most public services to the states, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, while governor took a meat axe to public education and presided over an economy that generated large numbers of near-minimum-wage jobs, and who will shut down most federal regulatory agencies, cut corporate taxes, and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
That’s the default scenario, the one which will become reality if Democratic apathy is allowed to fester. The rest of Reich’s column is more of a challenge to progressive/left Dems to fight for the causes that once made the Democratic Party a great champion of working people:
…Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.
You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.
Don’t expect an argument for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby separating commercial from investment banking and stopping Wall Street’s most lucrative and dangerous practices.
You won’t hear there’s no reason to cut Medicare and Medicaid – that a better means of taming health-care costs is to use these programs’ bargaining clout with drug companies and hospitals to obtain better deals and to shift from fee-for-services to fee for healthy outcomes…Nor will you hear why we must move toward Medicare for all.
Nor why the best approach to assuring Social Security’s long-term solvency is to lift the ceiling on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
Don’t expect any reference to the absurdity of spending more on the military than do all other countries put together, and the waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism – especially when we have so much to do at home…
Although proposals like these are more important and relevant than ever, they won’t be part of the upcoming presidential election.
The choice facing progressive Dems is between whining and hand-wringing about inadequate leadership of the Party on the one hand and doing something to change it on the other. Reich sounds the call to arms to put real progressive policies back on the agenda:
…I urge you to speak out about them – at town halls, candidate forums, and public events. Continue to mobilize and organize around them. Talk with your local media about them. Use social media to get the truth out.Don’t be silenced by Democrats who say by doing so we’ll jeopardize the President’s re-election. If anything we’ll be painting him as more of a centrist than Republicans want the public to believe. And we’ll be preserving the possibility (however faint) of a progressive agenda if he’s reelected.
Re-read that last graph. That alone is reason enough to push hard from the left inside the party — it actually strengthens Dem defenses against the GOP default scenario and it lays the foundation for a stronger progressive future for the Democratic Party, win or lose in 2012.
Still not juiced? Reich’s clincher:
Remember, too, the presidential race isn’t the only one occurring in 2012. More than a third of Senate seats and every House seat will be decided on, as well as numerous governorships and state races. Making a ruckus about these issues could push some candidates in this direction – particularly since, as polls show, much of the public agrees.Most importantly, by continuing to push and prod we give hope to countless Americans on the verge of giving up. We give back to them the courage of their own convictions, and thereby lay the groundwork for a future progressive agenda – to take back America from the privileged and powerful, and restore broad-based prosperity.
Grumble and gripe about inadequate leadership in your party, if you will. But do something this week to advance progressive policies and federal, state and local candidates who support them. Your actions add legitimacy to your critique.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, September 19, 2011
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