Reader RichardH suggested the article, Bill Moyers: Fighting Back Against Corporate Personhood, to me.  I’ll give you just a little teaser to encourage you to read the whole thing.

Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class, would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow succinctly summed up results: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel.

Each time I read another version of history, this time supplied by Bill Moyers, I learn some more nuance of our political past.

Moyer explains the antipathy of Jefferson, Madison, and Andrew Johnson to the bankers and industrialists of their time.  From High School history, I learned that these founding ancestors were perfect people that we must revere.  From the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, I learned that certainly Jefferson and Madison had some base, self-interested motives for their antipathy to northern industrialists.  From Moyers, I learn that though Jefferson and Madison may have been paranoid conspiracy theorists (from the Lies book), there were some sensible principles behind their objections to some of the rules put in place at the formation of the central banking system. Nuance, nuance, nuance.

I am glad to see some of our country’s thought leaders coming to realize that street protest is going to be an essential part of getting our government back.  Read the rest of the above article.

I found this version of the Associated Press article, Obama ‘putting colleges on notice’ on high tuition, to demonstrate to you what I heard on the CBS Evening News.

The article starts off with a summary of what the President said.

President Barack Obama fired a warning at the nation’s colleges and universities on Friday, threatening to strip their federal aid if they “jack up tuition” every year and to give the money instead to schools showing restraint and value.

In the article I found a rebuttal that I did not hear on the CBS Evening news.  This agrees with my immediate thoughts when I heard the President’s words.

University of Washington President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work. Young said the total cost to educate college students in Washington state, which is paid for by both tuition and state government dollars, has actually gone down because of efficiencies on campus. While universities are tightening costs, the state is cutting their subsidies and authorizing tuition increases to make up for the loss.

“They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.”

The last thing we need is for President Obama to be out selling the Republican propaganda that it is elitist college administrators jacking up the price of a college education.  In fact, Obama should be selling the idea that the efforts to reduce the deficit in the middle of a recession is cutting the funding for colleges and universities.  It is this behavior promoted by Republicans that is putting the onus on the students to pay the rising tuition costs.

Where other countries in the world, including some of the developing countries that are eating our lunch in the competition for manufacturing jobs, are paying most if not all the costs for higher education, the United States is cutting government support for higher education.

It is unconscionable for the President to be selling the regressive idea that the government’s cutting support for higher education is a wise policy to save the government some money.  This is an idiotic policy to turn The United States into a third world country.

I agree with Senator Sanders. I, too, get nervous when President Obama talks about working with the Republicans to reform Medicare. I’d much prefer him to work with progressive Democrats to reform Medicare. For instance, Medicare should be allowed to negotiate drug prices with its suppliers. Medicare might want to consider stopping the 15% premium above its own costs that it pays to private insurers to get them to do Medicare’s job in the program called Medicare Advantage. (I am subscribed to the program, and I appreciate the meager extra benefits I get for that 15%. However, in all honesty, it is probably a waste of money for the government to give such a subsidy to the private insurance companies. It does provide proof that the government run system is more cost-effective than what the private insurance industry is willing to do.)