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I can only address the system I know, but one of the drivers in my state is the declining support from state government. Year by year as the tally goes down, the cost borne by the student goes up.
Beyond that: Increased building costs. Increasing maintence costs for aging buildings. Fuel costs. Health care. Room and board. Text books. Increased government-funded research which gets spun out into private sector companies when it looks profitable. It all results in higher costs. None results in better take-home pay for the faculty.
That's not to say that universities shouldn't be doing a better job of cost-cutting. Brick and mortar projects in an electronic world. Non-teaching staff. Student fees. Bloated administrative costs. Vanity positions. Byzantine requirements which keep far too many students well past four years. Salaries should be starting to actually come down a little with boomer retirements. Could they cut into the pension plans some? I suppose so, but faculty hiring is pretty competitive. Saving money there definitely puts a university at a disadvantage in recruiting.
To wrap iot up, I agree that students need to be smarter about this process too as was mentioned by another poster here.
A clarification in my last satement/? in reply #7....Why don't we progressives repeat truthful talking points in the same manner the night of the living foxmerized repeat untruths?
DAM -- Thanks for the input. However it only makes me want to ask some more questions. I have both a laser printer (b/w and cost $800 like 15 years ago) and color printer -- HP photosmart 7960. The $125 was a laserjet cartridge and they do last a long time. My question is what are your comments on refurbishing the cartrigdes for my color printer at Costco? They charge like $9.99 per cartridge.
chuckle8...If our standard minimum wage had kept pace with overall income growth in the American economy, it would now be 21.16 per hour...stat from 2012, so I adjusted figure upward to account for the Koch's manipulating energy costs.
2950-10K -- I think the $22 per hour number is what the median wage would be if we had kept track with productivity and inflation. Other than that I agree with everything you say, and wonder why we do not do more repeating of our facts.
Off topic, but I have three things bugging the hell out of me. They're all about how we progressives answer to our critics. I listened to a progressive talk show individual, "fill in," field a call from a right wing imbecile today. The subject was minimum wage and the caller defended not raising it because he considered minimum wage earners as simply unskilled workers learning on the job. Wow..it takes 20 seconds of training to empty garbage or turn on the deep fryer. Beyond that the radio show host needed only reply that...fine let's keep the minimum wage...but the current minimum wage, when adjusted for inflation, is almost $22 per hour ... ...for god sakes just freaking keep repeating that...WTF!
Why do we keep arguing with people who believe society should be based on the biblical word of god, words written down by humans thousands of years ago who never spoke with god anymore than you or I have. Why don't we all rewrite the god damn bible? I spoke with god today too, and I can tell you this, the right wing sure as hell aint gonna like what he had to say. I'll just create the book of 2950-10K! and relay the info!
Lastly...the college debt being incurred by working class students has obviously deterred many from this income bracket from seeking higher education. However college expense for the 1%ers offspring is of no consequence.....how nice, this cuts the competition for jobs involving money and power, irregardless of talent and morality......just saying!
Why don't we as progressives repeat talking points with truth, the same way the night of the living foxmerized do?
All these things and more are already happening electronically with the roll out of smart meters. Download the multi award winning film TAKE BACK YOUR POWER to see how this insidious new technology will affect you , your children and community, and poses serious risks to our health, safety and security. To find an organisation near you to prevent installation or help remove a smart meter google stop smart meters.
PLEASE LOOK INTO THIS THOM.
Reality check...... Because you did not vote intelligently, we are in this fix. Grow up, deal with it, do something about it. excuses, do not solve issues. The GOP totally created this mess, fiqure out how to fix it. And don't complain, because your life sucks because of your attitude.
I disagree, we must not vote for either Dem or GOP any longer, simply because we feel hopeless. If the majority of people vote for other parties/people we CAN effect change within the parameters of the existing political system. The two parties rely on apathy and ignorance to remain in power. They offer NO significant substantive differentiation. The differences are cosmetic leaving us no choice. Without chioce there is NO freedom. We must vote for other parties/people, only in that way is our "vote" not wasted.
Warren, is an exception.
But Democrats do not even argue for FAIR taxation, the two parties only debate how much the 1% should NOT pay. They argue whether it should be a 20% a 30% a 40% or an X% tax cut. Both parties are privatizing profit and socializing debt. WORKING Americans are stuck with proportionately much higher tax burdens, while the idle and unproductive are given a "free" ride in our society.
Good ole "Maggie" Thatcher got it wrong. Lets correct her posthumously;
"The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money"
(I do agree with the other parts of your post)
We do have an opportunity here to reach out and discuss this ongoing corporate takeover. Those who continue to vote for less government, deregulation and support laws that interfer with our private lives are only falling into the trap that the Corporations have built for you. All our politicians are not corrupt show me where Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Peter DeFazio, Al Franken and the like have failed us as miserably as the Republican Party? The GOP have clearly taken the side of the almighty dollar and many people will do and say anything for money. They constantly push for more corporate power while removing those pesky safety standards that keep our air water and food supply healthy. They enjoy the same roads bridges airports etc as we do but the thing is we paid our taxes to have them. These 'legal' tax evaders believe they are above the law and above the little people that not only made them rich but continue to do so, these corporations are the true welfare receipients but they along with the GOP have skillfully divided us where we do not discuss the facts but call each other names while both parties thinking the other is lacking in intelligence. If we can get all voters on the same page we will be able to turn this around.
In my personal opinion of getting rid of both parties, I feel that will not happen in my lifetime and it only gives votes to the party you like least. The odds of any green party or any other party being part of the game is very slim. Don't waste your vote, Republicans count on it and so do the corporations pulling their strings.
The blood money comes from the Koch Brothers. The neotards are getting their wish. Death panels are our next adventure. If neotards steal the house, senate and presidency with the Koch Brothers blood money, they will plunge the nation into another Great Republican Depression and we will wish we were dead. I heard today that the Koch Brothers will give their operatives $125 million to steal the 2014 election. If they steal the 2016 election as well, it will be time for change in America.
Catastroika is a documentary on the neoliberal privatisation of Greece that is linked to the blood money Thom is correctly referring to. Pinochet was the precursor to Catastroika.
Aliceinwonderland ~ Your welcome! :-)
anarchist cop out ~ I would say that is wise. The Ten Commandments is the only part of the Bible claimed to have been written by the hand of God himself. However, the Bible also warns about "false Christs" who will come and deceive many. Therefore, I think it is important to keep an open mind about anything. It is all of our responsibility to look at any message that is claimed to come from God and ask ourselves in our own hearts, "Would the God I love actually say something like that?"
Then act accordingly!
I think if everyone looked at such messages that way even Isaac would have been spared a great traumatic experience at the hand of his father Abraham.
The IMF is saying to the Ukraine "look what wonderful things we did for Greece. We can do the same for you." Of course, they are not saying it. The only person that benefits from the IMF's helping hand is the banker they appoint after they dispose of the democratically elected Prime Minister.
Chi Matt -- I have pointed out that the economy was in an ideal period from New Deal to Reagan.
The easy demonstration of this is a chart in R. Reich's book "Aftershock". It is a chart plotting productivity and median wage. These two metrics follow each other until Reagan. Actually, they start to diverge under Jimmy Carter. Thom often points out that Jimmy Carter started drinking the Thatcher kool-aid.
I think Larry Beinhart has come up with a better set of metrics. Larry's metrics, in my opinion, more closely represent the success of the market place as described by Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations". The metrics that Mr. Beinhart suggest to use are the Dow (every capitalist's favorite), the GDP (every economist's albatross), the median wage and the number of jobs (inflation adjusted). L. Beinhart goes on to show that every time, in the income tax history of the US, the change in these metrics is positive the top tax rate is above 50%.
Incidentally, about the social mobility metric, the US was in the top 5 of social mobility before Reagan. Now, we are near the bottom of industrialized countries (i.e. OECD).
CHI MATT -- Are you confusing consensus with democracy?
"We the People" does not mean consensus.
As was posted when the NDAA issue was first discussed in 2012, this provision does not apply to US citizens:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/users/dominicmanzer/blog/2012/01/ndaa-does-not-apply-us-citizens
Norman Goldman, who is an attorney, says that he has read the NDAA thoroughly and agrees that this provision does not apply to US citizens. It would be interesting to know what Mike Papantonio has to say about this subject.
Matt, I smile. Thom is amazingly pleasant isn't he? It's also amusing to see him lose it and then apologize to his audience. Do you think of anything specific when you say he may not believe all he says, or is that sort of a generic assumption? BTW, you know everyone is not after your money nefariously. You've mentioned your church, for example.
The VA has been much in the news lately for unacceptable waiting times for services. The party that claims they can run government better, knew that two wars (off the books) would swell demand at the VA and they could have used that knowledge to prepare for the inevitable flood. Instead, a monomania for cutting government and it's financing was priority number one for the Rebublican controlled House. Can we believe that the result was unforeseen or was the problem due to a callous indifference to the needs of our vets? Austerity is not something just occurring in other countries like Greece; we just don't usually call it that.
The fact is, Matt, there can be no ethics in business as there can be no ethics in a competitive society. Ethics are an impediment to competitiveness. If one competitor gains an advantage using an unethical practice then all other competitors must also adopt the same practice or be at a serious disadvantage - if not be entirely done in. Thus any ethics in a competitive society and any ethics in business must be handed down by government in the form of laws and regulations. We determine what those ethics, and thus, what those laws and regulations are to be through the democratic process.
[quote=ChicagoMatt]
Do you think the CEO of McDonalds really hates the low-wage employees? Or, more likely, he or she doesn't give a damn about them. They aren't out to get you, they just don't care one way or the other. Not very Christian of them, if they claim that as their faith. But it's not my place to judge.
[/qoute]
The CEO does have a fair amount of contempt for their workers and has to to mistreat them so and to consider them some beasts or alien, inferior other not deserving of consideration as a human beings. I've known business leaders to routinely laugh and smirk at their workers calling them "n-words" or "wetbacks" (regardless of their actual race) or variations of "white trash".
Matt, have you ever worked in management, say at your McDonald's? If you had you would've gotten some of those memos. Aside from the fact that literally millions of such memos have been uncovered and leaked and are continuing to every day, you don't even need those "smoking guns", you can just ask almost anybody who works in management if they aren't instructed to exploit their workers to the fullest, ethics be dammed.
Check out Charlie Kernahgan's and others' anti sweatshop campaigns where they uncover that all the wholesome, whitebread American household name businesses (Nike, GAP, Converse, Levi's, Hane's, JC Penny, Puma - Walmart is a particularly big offender.) depend on Asian sweatshops - some with barbed wire fences and guard towers to keep those workers who are "perfectly happy the way they are" from escaping and regular beatings for missing production quotas
exerpt from Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard School-
"The children report being routinely slapped and beaten, sometimes falling down from exhaustion, forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, even some all-night, 19-to-20-hour shifts, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 6 ½ cents an hour. The wages are so wretchedly low that many of the child workers get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to brush their teeth using just their finger and ashes from the fire, since they cannot afford a toothbrush or toothpaste.
The workers say that if they could earn just 36 cents an hour, they could climb out of misery and into poverty, where they could live with a modicum of decency."
- because they don't want to pay fair (How can anyone ever know what fair is?), to Americans, and the lengths they go to to keep knowledge of their labor pracices from the American public.
The same thing happens right here in Chicago. I was a labor organizer for 9 years organizing poor laborers and temporary workers (who are used to defeat collective bargaining and circumvent labor law by outsourcing hitherto fair wage [how can anyone ever know what that means?] jobs on a massive scale in the obvious "conspiracy" to destroy the middle class) exposing the thousands of sweatshops right herein our unfair city. Again, those sweatshops were producing for Marshall Field's, L'Oreal Shampoo, The Chicago Tribune, H2O, The Cheesecake Factory, etc. and many miscellaneuos contractors that were supplying the household names.
I have a friend who studied "Industrial Engineering" at Northwestern. Industrial engineering has nothing to do with the engines of industry. It has all to do with how to exploit workers without regard for ethics and often willfully, directly counter to ethics and quite explicit instructions on doing just that. My friend was completely disgusted with it and now works with the lefty labor movement (Our Walmart, Fight for Fifteen and such) in Chicago.
I have several other friends who went to business school and left in disgust as they were instructed, often euphsmistically, to disregard ethics in their conduct in business.
Actually, the "secret memos" are not very secret at all. Although the big business PR services deny and keep on the down low the actual practices and intentions of business and try to keep knowledge about them from the general public, business leaders are quite open about them with one another. When I was in the Teamster reform movement I hung around with ISO members and read their publications. We in the movement and the socialists I hung around with got their information about the big business conspiracy right from the pages of Businessweek and Fortune magazine, where they were explicitly laid out, without having to read between the lines at all. Noam Chomsky recommends the same thing to get the real story quite simply. Business media presumes everyone reading their publications is either in on the grand scam or wants to be and anyway, they want large circulation as well as real relevance and exclusivity is not a way to achive that. Thus, as Lenin said, "We're going to hang the capitalists and they're going to sell us the rope.", the capitalists greed will be their own undoing in their conflict with the people.
Matt, fascists are great at fanning discontent. They are drawn to it like yellow jackets to fried chicken at a picnic. They are masters at exploiting discontent to serve their agenda. The "product' they are selling is toxic and dangerous.
Your judgment of Thom, i.e. the honesty of his analyses and assessments, strikes me as just some lame attempt to level the scales of credibility between right-wing and leftist commentary. I might agree with Thom only 98% of the time, but I would never assume Thom is deliberately misleading his audience. That's a serious accusation. Because when you say that someone doesn't believe everything he says, you're calling that person a liar. And Thom is no liar.
Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, there IS a right-wing conspiracy at work in this context. De-regulation and media consolidation are the workings of a plan to put our media in fewer & fewer corporate hands, and that is who controls the message. For decades now, these hacks have been brainwashing the public to think "gubmint" is evil and that it's time to privatize everything! Which is what leads to FASCISM, which we are well on our way towards living under. And mark my words, comrades; they've got their eyes on more than just our wallets. - Aliceinwonderland
DAnneMarc- I agree with many of your points. I wont be long winded but I will say this. There is a plan, not jsut in this country, but in this world. A plan that failed ultimately on a smaller scale with Hitler's "demise" as that was questionable at best as well. Even the people who are willing to believe they have a handle on the REAL reasons things happen, still tend to not look as deeply as required, or to be open minded enough to allow for new depths of corruption that might seem unrealistic, dare I say impossible in to the equation. The bottom line is, many of the events that take place that leave the world in awe, are orchistrated and carried out by the very people you want to let control your life even more. If you can't see that, you arent looking close enough. I personally have a deep and healthy distaste for the usage of the word "conspiracy" as it's use these days is widly to dissuade the public from even being open to something that incriminates poowerful, or key individuals from being in the spotlight. Once a conspiracy is attached to evidence it becomes a possibility. Once that evidence has proof, it's a fact.
Gun control is headed down a dark path. Disarming the only body that can take the Government out of power is one of the final stages of losing all of your freedoms. you will need permission to poop more than twice a day eventually. And the people who want to take the guns out of your hands are Mass murderers who dont stand trial. I would argue that the government does more damage in a decade with their "authorized" weapons than the american civilian populace have done in 100 years. Whos gonna take their guns away? Whos gonna take their rights? Who slaps them on the wrist, or throws them in jail when they commit crimes against humanity? NOONE. We laughed in the face of the UN with Iraq, now its like it never happened... NO actually it was always like it never happened. Which is what happens when the people give their power to the government and let them regulate literally every aspect of their life. Think about it. EVERYTHING is controlled. When you tell me that you want my guns because people with illegally obtained guns are doing bad things, my response is... No, welcome to real life, where bad things happen and you cant stop it no matter how much padding you put on my ass. People are so content to sacrifice their rights for comfort. That same mentality is why damn near every person in this generation has no idea whats going on in the world politically. Its the reason people like Bundy has support. Pure, unadulterated, ignorance... Which leads to the same pure, unfounded, fear. Fear is their ultimate weapon against us. The more they ruin the world, the more they will instil fear, the more they will control.
They cant take our guns... Not till they disarm themselves. My position will always be, as long as you wage war with other countries, and as long as your stance is to turn as many Americans into criminals as possible, My stance will be that giving up your opnly means of defense as a nation is not only foolish, but obsurd. An act of pure lunacy. I know what war is, I know how it feels. People think because they live in America that were safe fromt he things that happen in the rest of the world. If anything were the LEAST safe. We live in a haze of electronic distraction and steadily declining school systems overpopulated with disinclined youth. Few care that a high schoool senior in 2014 has the education level of a 10th grader in Europe, or even of a 10th grader 50 years ago right here in America. These things happen on purpose. They happen when people give more responsiblility to others ( like the government) and take less on themselves. People think they are on the cutting edge of the world, but really they are at the edge and about to be pushed off. Once we give up ourweapons, we have no chance of defending from the inevitable.We are programmed more every day to be slaves, and the idea that giving your own defences to an entity that has no intention of defending you is a good idea... Then you deserve whats coming.