Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
02 October 15
he Washington Post just ran an attack
on Bernie Sanders that distorts not only what he’s saying and seeking
but also the basic choices that lie before the nation. Sanders, writes
the Post’s David Fahrenthold, “is not just a big-spending liberal. And
his agenda is not just about money. It’s also about control.”
Fahrenthold claims Sanders’s plan for paying for
college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean “colleges would run
by government rules.”
Apparently Fahrenthold is unaware that three-quarters
of college students today attend public universities financed largely by
state governments. And even those who attend elite private universities
benefit from federal tax subsidies flowing to wealthy donors. (Meg
Whitman’s recent $30 million donation to Princeton, for example, is
really $20 million from her plus an estimated $10 million she deducted
from her taxable income.) Notwithstanding all this government largesse,
colleges aren’t “run by government rules.”
The real problem is too many young people still can’t
afford a college education. The move toward free public higher education
that began in the 1950s with the G.I. Bill and was extended in the
1960s by leading public universities was reversed starting in the 1980s
because of shrinking state budgets. Tuition has skyrocketed in recent
years as states slashed education spending. It’s time to resurrect that
earlier goal.
Besides, the biggest threats to academic freedom these
days aren’t coming from government. They’re coming as conditions
attached to funding from billionaires and big corporations that’s
increasing as public funding drops.
When the Charles Koch Foundation pledged $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, for example, it stipulated
that a Koch-appointed advisory committee would select professors and
undertake annual evaluations. The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs
at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that
funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental
justice.
Fahrenthold similarly claims Sanders’s plan for a single-payer system would put healthcare under the “control” of government.
But health care is already largely financed through
government subsidies – only they’re flowing to private for-profit health
insurers that are now busily consolidating into corporate laviathans.
Anthem purchase of giant insurer Cigna will make it the largest health
insurer in America; Aetna is buying Humana, creating the second-largest, with 33 million members.
Why should anyone suppose these for-profit corporate giants will be less “controlling” than government?
What we do know is they’re far more expensive than a
single-payer system.
Fahrenthold repeats the charge that Sanders’s
healthcare plan would cost $15 trillion over ten years. But single-payer
systems in other rich nations have proven cheaper than private
for-profit health insurers because they don’t spend huge sums on
advertising, marketing, executive pay, and billing.
So even if the Sanders single-payer plan would cost
$15 trillion over ten years, Americans as a whole would save more than
that.
Fahrenthold trusts the “market” more than he does the
government but he overlooks the fact that government sets the rules by
which the market runs (such as whether health insurers should be allowed
to consolidate even further, or how much of a “charitable” tax
deduction wealthy donors to private universities should receive, and
whether they should get the deduction if they attach partisan conditions
to their donations).
The real choice isn’t between government and the
“market.” It’s between a system responsive to the needs of most
Americans, or one more responsive to the demands of the super-rich, big
business, and Wall Street – whose economic and political power have
grown dramatically over the last three decades.
This is why the logic of Sanders’s ideas depends on
the political changes he seeks. Fahrenthold says a President Sanders
couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented anyway because Congress would
reject them. But if Bernie Sanders is elected president, American
politics will have been altered, reducing the moneyed interests’
chokehold over the public agenda.
Fahrenthold may not see the populism that’s fueling
Bernie’s campaign, but it is gaining strength and conviction. Other
politicians, as well as political reporters, ignore this upsurge at
their peril.
Comments
+40
#
2015-10-02 13:18
The once great WaPo
is a pathetic shadow of its former self, now like the NYT, a propaganda
machine overflowing with failed neo-con policies, weighted by
diminishing credibility. The mere fact that it's new owner is the
ruthless mercenary Founder/CEO of Amazon.com is sufficient to make its
editorial choices highly suspect.
+21
#
2015-10-02 13:36
Good article,
especially when it emphasized that universities and colleges now dance
to the Mephistophelian tune set by the Koch Brothers and other thieves
of democratic government. I grew up in Florida, didn't attend FSU but I
used to respect their biology department for its ocean studies in the
Gulf. Probably wrecked by now, since all rational research contributed
to the conclusion of global scorching.
Do you subscribe online to the Wash Post? I don't, but if I did I'd de-subscribe and tell them I don't want to read sludge written by the puppets of traitors. And we do need to send letters to the editors.
Do you subscribe online to the Wash Post? I don't, but if I did I'd de-subscribe and tell them I don't want to read sludge written by the puppets of traitors. And we do need to send letters to the editors.
+10
#
2015-10-02 14:16
NAVYVET--Comple tely
agree that "we do need to send letters to the editors', but to do that
effectively, we have to read the Post first. So maybe it is time grit
our teeth and do just that--with sharply worded letters critiquing the
"sludge" found there.
The days of Woodward and Bernstein and Editor Ben Bradlee are sadly dead and gone and not to be resurrected by Jeff Bezos, it appears.
The days of Woodward and Bernstein and Editor Ben Bradlee are sadly dead and gone and not to be resurrected by Jeff Bezos, it appears.
+18
#
2015-10-02 13:49
So the Koch brothers
pledged 1.5 million as long as they can have control? Why did the
University ever agree to this? 1.5 million doesn't seem nearly enough to
bend over and take it. What is wrong with that University that they
would sell their souls for this? Doesn't sound like a very worthy
institution at all. Very hard to respect them after this.
+16
#
2015-10-02 13:51
I'm feeling the Bern,
Robert. The corporate wing of the democratic party may want Hillary to
run unopposed, but I (and many others) aren't signing up for her
coronation. The "liberal" media ought to stop treating his candidacy as a
hopeless and ill advised tilt to the left, and start recognizing that
his popularity, which grows every day, is due to his support of "we the
people" as opposed to corporate "people" - you know the ones that plead
guilty to massive collusion or automotive safety hazards without having a
single "person" charged with a crime.
