NO! We should provide free education like other nations do!
87%
NO! We should start bailing out students instead of Wall Street!
13%
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Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
Thom & Louise at a "private audience" with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at his summer palace, Castle Gandolfo, Italy
From Screwed:
"The powers that be are running roughshod over the powers that OUGHT to be. Hartmann tells us what went wrong — and what you and I can do to help set American right again."
From Cracking the Code:
"Thom Hartmann ought to be bronzed. His new book sets off from the same high plane as the last and offers explicit tools and how-to advice that will allow you to see, hear, and feel propaganda when it's directed at you and use the same techniques to refute it. His book would make a deaf-mute a better communicator. I want him on my reading table every day, and if you try one of his books, so will you."
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Thom Hartmann channels the best of the American Founders with voice and pen. His deep attachment to a democratic civil society is just the medicine America needs."
If even just 25% of Americans eligible to vote wanted public funded education for all the POTUS would be Green and Greens would have a majority in both houses of Congress.
The "progressives" are the liberals who keep voting for the corporate party's Democrats so they can keep protesting against what they keep voting for.
www.chenangogreens.org
what we should do, is pay students to learn. The better they learn, the more they should earn. And when they are ready to participate in the economy, make sure the economy takes care of them proportional to their contribution. And as far as is possible, if someone is unemployed, give them a *job* learning. No such thing as unemployment.
As far as the .01% goes, it's time we understand that many of them, and those that serve them in government, are free riders of the highest caliber. They have taken far more money out of our pockets than all the welfare queens ever did [and welfare queens are, to be real, a fiction] Nobody has found one yet. The .01% fancy themselves, many of them, to be in possesion of some sort of God given inate wonderfulness, and feel entitled to the fruit of toil of the many. They take money out of the pockets of those who toil *before* it lands in those pockets, and call it capitalism and free markets. This they have done by cultivating ignorance, fear, and with utter disregard for those many who are good and decent people who oppose their sociopathic ways. They cannot be good people for good people care what good people think. They care not. Many belong in mental institutions, and prisions. Too big to jail, they tell us. These few are isolated and protected from reality. They cannot win an election without The Stupid Vote, and they are keenly aware of this.
Money must be in motion to do work. If they have great gobs of cash doing no meaningful work, confiscate it, burn it, take it out of circulation, to limit inflation. This after the trust funds they have plundered have been paid off. What has happened is too many dollars have been printed and put into circulation, and too much of it has ended up being hoarded in such a way that it can do little to no work, so as to minimize inflation [morally, it has been stuffed into a mattress]. The distribution of wealth is too weak a function of the real world [read *market*] and far too strong a function of politics for far too long.
the turn around begins when we take the money and corruption out of politics by voting wisely.
If people want an education they should be able to get one. But there should be some responsibility by the people wanting the education. Getting an education should not be just the default because it is free.
I went to college after high school because it was the thing to do. I did not know what I wanted to study, and was not mature enough to handle college. After one year I was on academic probation.
I went back to school 3 years later and was a "B" student. I should have waited.
Like I said, if some one is ready and willing to get an education, they should be able to get on.
When I went to my State University it was not "FREE." My parents (and even I as a youth) had paid taxes for many years to establish State supported university education. Stop calling it "free." We all pay for it, because it is in our society's best interest to raise each individual to their highest potential. Since graduating (I'm now long past retirement) as a Professional Engineer, I've contributed many many times what my education cost my state, my parents, and me.
Isn't the Internet the best education? One can read the widest possible array of information from a vast number of perspectives, on any given topic.
Aren't schools just a way for instructors to make money? Other than the need to learn the jargon, isn't on-the-job training more useful than classroom education?
The debt trap our educational system has become is as "uniquely American" as our pay-or-die healthcare system. It is an outrageous injustice that young people graduate from college deeply in debt before their professional lives have even begun. In this country, NOTHING is a human right. It is an abusive, cruel system, shoving more & more of us down an economic black hole from which there is no escape. Upward mobility is now a thing of the past. - Aliceinwonderland
A lot of folks these days are talking about rights, like the "right to bear arms." I believe free education, including university education, should be a universal right. Unfortunately, since universities became money-making institutions this has not been possible. A swift shift towards a non-monetary system or culture would take care of this problem.
Hi! This is a great point! Responsibility and freedom MUST always go hand-in-hand. When everyone are free to pursue their education goals without the restrictions of class/financial standing, they are always obligated to be responsible. Our society/s have expected each individual to be responsible and have forgotten the other half of the equation. Which is, that we all are responsible for each other as well as ourselves. A strong message that Thom Hartmann puts forth in "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" is that our highest indicator that we are a successful civilization should be the safety and security of all. I believe taking care of everyone's educational costs fits in well with this standard.
"humanbeing" sez: "...isn't on-the-job training more useful than classroom education?"
Yeah, if that's all education is really supposed to be about: cranking out more trained laborers for the work force! I tend to think of education as an end in itself, teaching us how to think philosophically as well a logically; also as a force that preserves the core elements of what comprises culture, ours and others. We'd be a lot worse off without scholars like Thom showing us the "bigger picture". And let's face it, nothing scares Plutocrats more than an educated citizenry, because they are harder to control. - Aliceinwonderland