Why Did College Student Voter Participation DOUBLE In 2018? Was It More Than Just Hatred Of Trump?

Thursday, we discussed New Mexico's plan to fully fund tuition in public colleges and universities for all its students. That's delivering-- something Pelosi and her pathetic leadership team doesn't understand in any way shape or form. Yesterday, Tufts University released a report about student participation in the 2018 election cycle. It doubled-- and it helped Democrats recapture the House and elect does of new members. Pelosi and her team need to understand that these woke students did not vote to further the career trajectories of a bunch of corrupt establishment Democrats. And if they don't start delivering, these students will not become part of any lasting Democratic Party coalition.

In a discussion of the Israeli elections I had today with one progressive congressman, he noted that "the standard liberal platform of better healthcare, lower housing costs, higher pension payments, better relations with the Palestinians, etc. (Labor/Meretz) went absolutely nowhere" and that "the socialist parties in Europe are getting absolutely clobbered." When I asked him why, he said, among other things, that "when the socialist parties actually are in power, they don’t do shit for people, the most recent case being France under Hollande, whose approval rating ended at 22%."

I reminded him of how some members of Congress, himself included, do pass legislation of great value to working families. I asked if it is reasonable to expect candidates running on platforms that will make peoples' live tangibly better to follow through. He said Bernie's record-- having passed more legislation that any other member when he was in the House is a good sign he and reminded me that Elizabeth Warren-- albeit before she was a senator-- created the CFPB and got it through Congress and signed by the president and "in the Senate, she made her mark by creating, thoughtful, sound legislation that was never going to go anywhere, but still represented what the Democrats ought to do when they return to power."

In her introduction to the Tufts report, Nancy Thomas, Director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, wrote that "In the 2018 midterm elections, the average student voting rate at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled from the last midterm elections, jumping from 19% in 2014 to 40% in 2018. The fact that student voting rates increased is no surprise since, according to the U.S. Election Project’s analysis, voting rates among all Americans increased 13.6 percentage points. What is surprising is that college and university student voting rose a remarkable 21 percentage points. Perhaps now is a good time to stop focusing on why college students don’t vote and start understanding why they do vote."

The Climate Crisis is driving a great deal of student activism and electoral participation-- as are proposals for debt-free and tuition-free college. I asked some of the congressional candidates what they are finding when they are out talking with younger voters. "Looking back over our history," said Jason Butler, the progressive Democrat running against George Holding (R) in northeast North Carolina, "young adults have always been critical in pushing political dialogue but now I sense an even deeper urgency. As I talk to high school and college students I am struck with the passion in their voice and their willingness to act. Specifically, the top two issues I consistently hear are climate change and an assault weapons ban. And this makes sense as these are issues that affect them directly. It is a common saying that “all politics is local” and this is ever-the-case with young adults when it comes to these two issues. They are living through mass shootings and must regularly endure “active shooter drills.” And furthermore, they realize that they have the most at stake when it comes to climate change. Yes, we need to listen to them and be willing to be led by them because they are not afraid to blaze a new pathway in our political discourse. From the Climate Strike this Friday to the March for Our Lives Movement - young adults are changing politics for the good. I will continue to support their leadership and vision for a better society."

Kara Eastman's daughter just went off to college and Kara, running for Congress in a blue-trending Omaha district talks to college students out on the hustings all the time. They are likely to help her replace backward Republican Donald J. Bacon, a complete Trump patsy. "College-age students tell me they are excited to vote for someone who does not talk down to them and who speaks about the things they care about," Kara told me today. "I recently attended a University of Nebraska Omaha and Creighton University collaborative event where I talked to many students. They voiced their concerns for the environment with a particular focus on pollution. A few also said they were happy to see that I was not taking corporate PAC donations as they are tired of the corrupt political system. As a campaign, we include college students as interns, volunteers, advisors and staff because we know that their voices are so important to the rising electorate."

Progressive congressional candidate Kathy Ellis was in L.A. for a wedding yesterday and we sat down for dinner. She told me that young people in southeast Missouri "are fed up with the current situation, and rightfully so. They graduate college with enormous amounts of debt and dwindling opportunities for well-paying jobs. For young people in my district, the situation is even more dire: with the shrinking of our local job market, young people who can attend school are forced to move elsewhere to pay off their debt. They want debt-free college; a living wage; better, more affordable healthcare; and opportunities to move forward in society. I couldn't agree with them more, and I proud to be building a campaign team of almost entirely young people."

Conservatives Like Trump And Biden Don't Back The Idea Of Free College, But New Mexico Is Moving Ahead Anyway

Maggie Toulouse Oliver is New Mexico's Secretary of State and currently the progressive candidate for the U.S. Senate seat Tom Udall is retiring from. This morning she told me, in a statement, that "As a single mom who is still paying off student loans-- and has taken on additional loans to pay for my oldest son's college education-- I know how much this innovative plan will help New Mexicans. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is leading where Washington has failed. I look forward to bringing the lived experience of a single mom who worked her way through college to the U.S. Senate. And I look forward to taking bold New Mexico ideas, like universal free college tuition, with me to D.C. so that we can improve the lives of all American families."

You know how states are supposed to be the petri dish of innovative government? Yesterday, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will pay the tuition for all students at New Mexico's 29 public two-year and four-year colleges. Bernie's platform in action! (Needless to say, Republicans and Status Quo Joe oppose these kinds of plans.) New Mexico will use revenues from oil production to pay for the program. Simon Romero and Dana Goldstein broke the story yesterday for the NY Times, emphasizing the universality of the plan and dubbing it "one of the boldest state-led efforts to expand access to higher education. The move comes," they wrote, "as many American families grapple with the rising cost of higher education and as discussions about free public college gain momentum in state legislatures and on the presidential debate stage. Nearly half of the states, including New York, Oregon and Tennessee, have guaranteed free two- or four-year public college to some students. But the New Mexico proposal goes further, promising four years of tuition even to students whose families can afford to pay the sticker price."

“I think we’re at a watershed moment,” said Caitlin Zaloom, a cultural anthropologist at New York University who has researched the impact of college costs on families. “It used to be that a high school degree could allow a young adult to enter into the middle class. We are no longer in that situation. We don’t ask people to pay for fifth grade and we also should not ask people to pay for sophomore year.”

By some measures, the tuition initiative will be the most ambitious in a growing national movement. College costs and student debt have emerged as major issues in the Democratic presidential primary, with two of the leading contenders for the nomination-- Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-- promising to make all public colleges and universities free. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has a more limited proposal to eliminate community college tuition.

So far, states, not the federal government, have led the way-- sometimes out of a hope that a more educated work force would attract businesses and improve local economies. As of 2018, 17 states had programs promising free college to at least some students, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Most of those programs cover tuition only at two-year institutions.

...Like the New York program, the New Mexico plan would cover only tuition, not living expenses, and the funds would be available only after a student drew from existing state aid programs and from federal grants.

But the New Mexico proposal does go further than New York’s Excelsior Scholarship in two regards: It is available to all students, regardless of family income, and it includes funds for adults looking to return to school at community colleges.

“This program is an absolute game changer for New Mexico,” Governor Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “In the long run, we’ll see improved economic growth, improved outcomes for New Mexican workers and families and parents.”

Officials contend that New Mexico would benefit most from a universal approach to tuition assistance. The state’s median household income is $46,744, compared with a national median of $60,336. Most college students in the state also come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds; almost 65 percent of New Mexico undergraduates are among the nation’s neediest students, according to the state’s higher education department.

The new program in New Mexico would be open to recent graduates of high schools or high school equivalency programs in the state, and students must maintain a 2.5 grade point average. In contrast to other states, like Georgia, that have curbed access to public colleges by unauthorized immigrants, New Mexico would open the tuition program to all residents, regardless of immigration status.

Carmen Lopez-Wilson, the deputy secretary of New Mexico’s Higher Education Department, said the program would benefit about 55,000 students a year at an annual cost of $25 million to $35 million. She added that the state was trying to bolster its higher education system, which endured spending cuts of more than 30 percent per student from 2008 to 2018.

“We’re giving money directly to students,” Ms. Lopez-Wilson said. “This is the best way to begin rebuilding the infrastructure of higher education in New Mexico.”

Ms. Lopez-Wilson said the relatively low cost of the program reflected low tuition costs in the state, with many students already receiving forms of assistance. Other states that have less extensive tuition assistance proposals are spending far more.

A year of tuition at the state’s flagship campus, the University of New Mexico, costs $7,556 for state residents. At the state’s largest community college, Central New Mexico Community College, tuition costs are generally less than $3,000 per year.

New Mexico already has some of the lowest debt rates for graduates of four-year colleges. In the class of 2017, they owed $21,237 on average, compared with a national average of $28,650, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

...[B]oth chambers in New Mexico are controlled by Democrats, and while fiscal conservatives still have considerable sway in the state, legislators have already shown willingness recently to increase spending on public education. State and federal spending on early childhood programs, including prekindergarten, is climbing to $546 million this year in New Mexico, a $135 million increase from the previous year.

In a departure from the belt-tightening after the 2008 financial crisis, New Mexico also gave raises to public-school teachers and the faculty and staff of the University of New Mexico this year.

The free-tuition plan points to the shifting political landscape in New Mexico, traditionally a swing state that was up for grabs by both major parties. It is now emerging as a bastion of Democratic power in the West, standing in contrast to other large oil-producing states controlled by Republicans. At the same time, an oil boom in the Permian Basin shared by New Mexico and Texas is lifting the state’s revenues.

In some ways, the burst of interest in free public college is a return to the nation’s educational past. As recently as the 1970s, some public university systems remained largely tuition-free.

As a bigger and more diverse group of undergraduates entered college in recent decades, costs rose, and policymakers began to promote the idea of a degree as less of a public benefit than a private asset akin to a mortgage, according to Professor Zaloom, of N.Y.U. Many states raised tuition, and students became more reliant on grants and loans.

“We should be looking at the examples from our own history,” Professor Zaloom said. Free college educations from the University of California, the City University of New York and other public systems, she added, have been “some of the most successful engines of mobility in this country.”

When we first endorsed Eva Putzova, one state over in Arizona, she told us she supports "fully publicly funded education from pre-K through college for all. Education is the great equalizer and foundation of any prosperous, civil society. Today, college students are $1.3 trillion in debt. This is a huge burden on them as they start their lives after school and enter the workforce.  We managed to provide a debt-free education to veterans after World War II, and to the baby boom generation as well. In 1969, in Arizona, annual tuition was $272 and one could earn that working in a minimum wage job for 1 month. Today's students in Arizona have to work for more than 6.5 months to pay for their year in college. Imagine what we could achieve if we approached education in a spirit of solidarity: today's graduates working and paying taxes which would allow a new generation to benefit from the same education they once received. Just like healthcare, education should be a right, not a privilege."

This is also of great concern to Milwaukie, Oregon mayor Mark Gamba, the current progressive challenger for the Oregon congressional seat held by conservative Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. It's one of the issues he's running on. "Our current system of secondary education here in America largely sets young people up for failure while theoretically setting them up for success," he told me last night. "Young adults coming out of college with massive debt can’t afford to take a job that pays poorly even though it might be the right stepping stone to the career they’ve always dreamed of, instead they are required to find a job that pays them well enough to keep up with their debt payment. It didn’t used to be this way, it shouldn’t be this way and it isn’t this way in many of the countries we compete with on the world market. Rather than a system of education designed to enrich bankers, we should have a system of education designed to have the most well-educated population in the world. That’s why I’m a strong proponent for free public college education for anyone carrying a decent GPA out of high school."

Jennifer Christie, the progressive candidate in an open Indiana congressional district in the suburbs north of Indianapolis, got back from walking the UAW picket line last night and wrote me that she "worked very hard to pay for my own college education and to pay off every single penny of my student debt. I had sleepless nights working 2nd and 3rd shifts in a nursing home to pay for my tuition while I was in school. I graduated with honors in both Chemistry and Biology... two degrees paid for mostly by me. I was the first to graduate from college in my family. So why do I support free college tuition? Because I know what a college degree did for me. Because we have tough problems to solve and education fosters innovation. Because it was so hard to fund it by myself. Because I don’t want my kids to have to do what I did. Because a simple tax on Wall Street speculation would pay for it. Because we bailed out Wall Street. Now it’s time for Wall Street to return the favor for my kids and yours. It will be the best investment they’ll ever make!"

Ellen Lipton Beat Betsy DeVos In Lansing-- And Will Continue Beating Her In DC

Last month Digby introduced me to another extraordinary woman running for Congress, this one in Michigan, Ellen Lipton. Ellen's district is the 9th, from which Sandy Levin is retiring. This is a safe Democratic district in the suburbs north of Detroit (PVI is D+4 and Hillary beat Trump there 51.5% to 43.7%. Obama had beaten Romney by a much better margin: 57.2-41.9%.) The district is southern Macomb and eastern Oakland counties and includes Royal Oak, Fernadle, Warren, Eastpointe, Mount Clemens, Franklin and Bingham Farms.

Ellen raised two kids, worked as a patent attorney, helping universities and small businesses often in competition with large, powerful corporations. As a survivor of Multiple Sclerosis (MS), she became involved in public life when she joined the fight to allow life-saving stem cell research in Michigan. She ran for State Representative in 2008 and served three full terms, the maximum allowed in the state. As a legislator, she led the fight against Betsy DeVos’ efforts to destroy Michigan’s public-school system. After leaving Lansing, Ellen founded and was named President of the Michigan Promise Zone Association, which supports free community college tuition, technical training and certification to Michigan students in selected communities across Michigan, a blueprint for free college tuition across America.

She's the only woman in a four-way Democratic Primary, a progressive through and through and her work with the Promise Zones and in holding DeVos at bay prompted me to ask her to share those specific experiences with DWT readers. Read this below and if you like what you hear, please consider contributing to the campaign of Blue America's newest endorsed candidate. Just click on the ActBlue congressional thermometer on the right. Let's make Michigan great again!

Guest Post
-by Ellen Lipton

Before Betsy DeVos became nationally reviled for her corporate education reform agenda as Trump’s Education Secretary, she spent years attacking public schools in Michigan, her home state. We were her political petri dish.

One of her most damaging proposals was the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a program that would implement a statewide school district tasked with turning around “low performance schools.” Her metric for measuring performance was to look at standardized test scores, a highly flawed metric of school performance that by design discriminates against low income and minority students.

I served three terms in the Michigan State House, and for two of those terms I fought tooth and nail against DeVos and others like her who were intent on destroying public schools in Michigan. While I was in Lansing, a bill that would have codified the EAA into state law was being rushed through committee, backed by Republicans and even a few Democrats. None other than John Covington, a nationally infamous proponent of privatizing public education, came to our committee to testify about how successful an EAA pilot program had been in Detroit, and announced that we ought to just trust him to work his magic across the rest of the state. Needless to say, his record in Detroit was abysmal-- our schools in the city have been demonstrably worse off because of his work.

The problem with John Covington and Betsy DeVos and their one-size-fits-all, pro-privatization “solutions” to problems in education is that there are no magic bullets in turning around schools. Solving problems in education requires a lot of work, a lot of patience, and crucially, a lot of additional funding. During the committee hearing, I grilled Covington about his wild claims of success because the math just didn’t add up. When he couldn’t answer my questions, I sent an extensive FOIA request to the EAA, which they promptly ignored. It wasn’t until I threatened a lawsuit that they finally released the documents, which made it clear as day that the failed experiment of the EAA was riddled with abuses of power and misallocations of funds. Betsy DeVos’ dream of destroying Michigan’s public school system finally came to an end.

I’m proud of the work I did taking on Betsy DeVos in Lansing-- but being a legislator, whether in the State House or in Washington, isn’t just about stopping bad things from happening. It’s about reshaping the narrative around issues we care about, proposing bold solutions to those problems, and mobilizing the community around supporting a progressive agenda.

One narrative I hate the most is this idea that our schools are failing, and so our students are failing. Our kids aren’t failing at all-- they’re doing incredible work in the face of enormous challenges. And one of the greatest challenges they face is our nationwide crisis of college affordability. So many bright, hardworking students that want to attend college can not afford to go; those that do graduate often find themselves saddled with a lifetime of crushing student loan debt.

In Michigan, we’ve taken a stab at addressing this critical issue. Nearly ten years ago, the legislature created ten “promise zones” in economically distressed communities throughout the state. These promise zones guarantee two years of free college for every single student that graduates from public school in that district. As a legislator, I worked with community leaders in Hazel Park, a community that had been battered during the Great Recession, to establish the Hazel Park Promise Zone, and I am the current treasurer of the organization.

The results in Hazel Park have been incredible. Students who never thought they could go to college see a path to the future. The school district has been strengthened, the community has been brought together, graduation rates have improved, and property values have increased as young families are moving to Hazel Park because of the opportunities they and their children now have.

In addition to providing students with free tuition, the promise zones assist students with completing FAFSA applications and provide help with applying for other public and private scholarships, so that every student can attend college free from the burden of student loans.

After I left the legislature, I founded and became the President of the Michigan Promise Zone Association. I remain committed to my mission to strengthen what we have achieved in Hazel Park and communities all across the state. I am proud to say that just three years after I left Lansing, the number of promise zones in Michigan has grown from 10 to 15.

But my work is far from over. If Betsy DeVos had had her way in Michigan, the promise zones would never have come to fruition, and public schools would have continued to be degraded for the benefit of the wealthy few. If I am elected to Congress, I will do everything in my power to stop Betsy DeVos dead in her tracks once again, and prevent her harmful privatization agenda from destroying our public education system. I’ll also be a leader in solving the crisis of college affordability. What we’ve done in Michigan with the promise zones can happen on a national level. We need a tuition-free, debt-free path to college for every young person in this country, and I will work hard in Washington every day to make that dream a reality.

Would Free Public Colleges and Universities Threaten the All-Volunteer Military?

Cost of college, 1985 through 2012, compared to other consumer costs (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

I'd like to put a simple idea in front of you, a connection between the predatory student debt scam and the military.

Bernie Sanders has argued the public colleges and universities should be free today, for the same reason that public high schools were free in the past. In the past, basic education — initially grade school, then grade school and high school — was considered both a public right and a public good. An educated nation was both a strong nation and a productive one, and in fact, one of the cornerstones of our preeminence in the world through the 1960s was our education system ... and its availability.

Note that through this entire period, private schools — grade schools and high schools — also existed and thrived. The sons and daughters of the wealthy or the religiously motivated always had those options available. There was no "crowding out."

Today, in this complex world, "basic education" means college as well. Sanders' idea is therefore simply an extension of what we've always done, made "basic education" free to the public at public expense, along with other privately financed options.

Note that free public college and university education would immediately alleviate the crushing burden of student debt, at least for new students. So it's a triple win — we'd get a stronger nation, a more productive one, and a less debt-burdened one, all with one stroke.

Free Education and the Military

So where would those students come from? Many would come from the post-high school work force (think Starbucks, Target and McDonald's), but a great many would also come from populations that turn to the military for employment. Which suggests the question — Is America's military and our military engagements a barrier to free public post-high school education?

I think the answer may be yes, given the number of men and women who join the military to get military-financed education benefits. As you'll read, that's 75% of enlistees.

Consider this, from Peter Van Buren, a former State Department Foreign Service Officer, writing at Common Dreams (my emphasis):

Does Free College Threaten Our All-Volunteer Military?

Does free college threaten our all-volunteer military? That is what writer Benjamin Luxenberg, on military blog War on the Rocks says. But the real question goes deeper than Luxenberg’s practical query, striking deep into who we are as a nation....

Right now there are only a handful of paths to higher education in America: have well-to-do parents; be low-income and smart to qualify for financial aid, take on crippling debt, or…

Or join the military.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill provides up to $20,000 per year for tuition, along with an adjustable living stipend. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is located, that stipend is $2,800 per month. There is also a books and supplies stipend. Universities participating in the Yellow Ribbon Program make additional funds available without affecting the GI Bill entitlement. Some 75 percent of those who enlisted said they did so to obtain educational benefits.

There's that 75% number. Van Buren continues:

Luxenberg raises the question of whether the free (Bernie Sanders) or lower cost (Hillary Clinton) college education is a threat to America’s all-volunteer military. If so many people join up to get that college money, if college was free or cheaper, would they still enlist?

It is a practical question worth asking, but raises more serious issues in its trail. If people are enlisting in significant part because college tuition is not affordable, does that imply tuition costs need to stay high to help keep the ranks filled? That an unequal college costs playing field helps sustain our national defense?

America faces twin problems with respect to higher education — the crushing burden of student debt, and the fiercely escalating price of college, tuition and fees, that this debt enables. I think you could safely say that without the availability of student loans — which are structured to greatly benefit lenders at the expense of student debtors — tuition increases would not be economically feasible.

Put more simply, bankers and other lenders feed on student debt, grow fat on it in fact. Student debt, in turn, feeds the price charged by the colleges and universities who receive most of that money, which then drives the need for more debt. Everyone wins — banks, universities — everyone except students, who are the victims in this scam. Even those who receive "good" educations are sucked dry. All college students today, graduates or dropouts, leave with a mountain of debt they will carry for decades. They leave with the equivalent of a mortgage — but without the house, and often without a decent job to finance it.

Killing the student loan program by killing the need for loans would immediately change the lives of millions of young people, a whole generation. The bankers won't be happy, but their moaning would prove instantly why these loan programs are so prevalent in the first place — to feed the greed, and no other reason.

And once again, private colleges and universities would still exist and would still be free to charge anything they like. Of course, they'd now have to compete with the free universities, something that would likely bring down even those tuition costs. Sounds like a win-win, yes?

But Where Will the Money Come From? Cancel the F-35.

But how would we "pay for it" (assuming that money works differently from the way it does in the real world, that money is a zero-sum game, like gold)? Here's another simple idea, again from the article:

Money matters, but what the country can get for its money is also important. Let’s round off the military higher education benefit, tuition and living stipend, to $53,000 a year. An F-35 fighter plane costs $178 million.

Dropping just one plane from inventory generates enough money for 3,358 years of college money. We could even probably survive as a nation if we didn’t buy four or five of the planes. A lot of people who now find college out of reach could go to school

Let's make that even easier. Cancel the F-35 completely. After all, it's dangerous to operate and barely flies. Reuters:

U.S. sees lifetime cost of F-35 fighter at $1.45 trillion

The U.S. government now projects that the total cost to develop, buy and operate the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be $1.45 trillion over the next 50-plus years, according to a Pentagon document obtained by Reuters.

The Pentagon's latest, staggering estimate of the lifetime cost of the F-35 -- its most expensive weapons program -- is up from about $1 trillion a year ago, and includes inflation....

The Pentagon still plans to buy 2,443 of the new radar-evading, supersonic warplanes, plus 14 development aircraft, in the coming decades, although Air Force Secretary Michael Donley last week warned that further technical problems or cost increases could eat away at those numbers.

You could finance a lot of free public college and university education with $1.5 trillion. Not buying 2500 planes at $180 million per plane would itself save a half-trillion dollars.

As to how we'd fight all of our wars without out-of-options young people forced by circumstances to enlist ... well, maybe we'd have to justify those wars to the public in more effective ways. After all, enlistments in WWII weren't hard to come by.

GP
 

Barack Obama-- Definitely Better Than Nothing

Last week we took a look at two revealing interviews of Elizabeth Warren, one by Bill Moyers and the other by Steve Inskeep. Thomas Frank did one for Salon in which she takes on Obama’s shortcomings much more directly than we’ve seen her do before. She focused on the two issues she used in Massachusetts to propel her into the Senate: the lack of accountability for politically-connected Wall Street predators and an educational system that is rigged against middle-class students and their families. Frank, calling her “the single most exciting Democrat currently on the national stage,” is clear from the start where he’s coming from— and where he’s trying to go.

Thomas Frank: I want to start by talking about a line that you’re famous for, from your speech at the Democratic National Convention two years ago: “The system is rigged.” You said exactly what was on millions of people’s minds. I wonder, now that you’re in D.C. and you’re in the Senate, and you have a chance to see things close up, do you still feel that way? And: Is there a way to fix the system without getting the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United or some huge structural change like that? How can we fix it?

That’s the question that lies at the heart of whether our democracy will survive. The system is rigged. And now that I’ve been in Washington and seen it up close and personal, I just see new ways in which that happens. But we have to stop and back up, and you have to kind of get the right diagnosis of the problem, to see how it is that— it goes well beyond campaign contributions. That’s a huge part of it. But it’s more than that. It’s the armies of lobbyists and lawyers who are always at the table, who are always there to make sure that in every decision that gets made, their clients’ tender fannies are well protected. And when that happens— not just once, not just twice, but thousands of times a week— the system just gradually tilts further and further. There is no one at the table…I shouldn’t say there’s no one. I don’t want to overstate. You don’t have to go into hyperbole. But there are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

…TF: When I talk to people, they often say Democrats aren’t the party of working people at all. And they talk about NAFTA and deregulating Wall Street, and they say, look at these guys, they won’t prosecute the financial industry. They say, Democrats talk a good game, but they’re always on the side of the elite at the end of the day. What do you say to these people?

EW: We’re the only ones fighting back. Right now, on financial reform, the Republicans are trying to roll back the financial reforms of Dodd-Frank. In fact, Mitch McConnell has announced that if he gets the majority in the Senate, his first objective is to repeal healthcare and his second is to roll back the financial reforms, and in particular to target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau— the one agency that’s out there for American families, the one that has returned more than four billion dollars to families who got cheated by big financial institutions. That’s in just three years.

So, Democrats have not done all that they should, but at least we’re out there fighting for the right things. We’re fighting and I think trying to pull in the right direction. So if the question is, hold us to a higher standard, man, I’m there. You’re right. [If] you want to criticize and say, “you should do more!,” the answer is: Yes, we should! You bet! We should be stronger. We should be tougher. But understand the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party right now. It’s pulling as hard and fast as it can in the opposite direction.

TF: No doubt about that. I should ask you about— and we’re talking about the financial crisis and the failure to prosecute anyone, and the…I’m sorry, I’m going to get the name confused, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

EW: That’s okay. It was named by Republicans to be as confusing a name as possible. (laughs) I used to think of it as the four random initials. (laughs) I just call it my consumer agency. So that’s it, just the consumer agency.

TF: So here’s another aspect of this: Eric Holder is stepping down as attorney general, and you in the Senate are going to have to confirm a successor. And one of the things, I don’t know if you’ve followed this or not, but one of the things the Department of Justice has been doing, if you look at the actual prosecutions they’ve been making, they essentially blame the financial crisis on little people. People who lied on their loan applications. And I wonder, are you going to demand something different out of his successor? You’re going to have a chance to confirm this guy and talk to this guy…

EW: You bet I am. I want to be clear on this. It’s the Justice Department. But it’s also the banking regulators. And the SEC. So the most recent hearing we held that had them all in together— you know we get them in twice a year— and, boy, you want to ask me if I’m glad to be in the United States Senate? (laughs) I get to be on the Banking Committee, and twice a year we haul the banking regulators in front of us for supervision. For oversight I should say, not supervision. So we had them all in. . . . We had them all in, in July. And that was the question I asked: How many big bank executives have you referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution?

TF: That’s a very good question. I was going to ask you that, too.

EW: Exactly right. Because that’s the other half of how the game is rigged. You know, we think of it in terms of Congress, and we should, because it’s definitely rigged in Congress and this is a place where people can do something about it. But the wind always blows from the same direction through the agencies. Those agencies, the banking regulators, who do they hear from, day in and day out? Big banks. They don’t hear from people who got cheated on their mortgages, people who got tricked on their credit cards. They hear from the big financial institutions, day after day after day. That’s, in part, what this whole Fed— this latest scandal at the Fed— you know with Carmen Segarra who has the tapes. Part of what that shows, if you just back up and think about what you’re seeing there, it’s that the supervisors, or regulators as they’re called— everybody commonly calls them that— the regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don’t see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

TF: That’s right. Regulatory capture, this is an old problem. I was writing about it, obviously, in the Bush days. But President Obama had a golden opportunity when he came in to change the system and I just don’t feel like it has changed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aside. I mean, are the regulators now referring things to the Justice Department? Are the wheels turning again?

EW: There has not been nearly enough change. Not nearly enough. The consumer agency— this is why I argued for it— the consumer agency is structural change. So basically, the premise behind it was that there were plenty of federal laws out there, but no agency would step up and enforce them. And the responsibilities of these laws were scattered among seven different agencies and not one of those agencies saw its principal job as looking out for American families. So the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] was all about bank profitability, the Fed was all about monetary policy. Everybody had something that they were about, but consumer protection was everybody’s job and therefore nobody’s job. You know, it was down seventh, or tenth or hundredth on the list and they never got to it, even as the big financial institutions were selling mortgages that should have been described as grenades with the pins pulled out. Really! My whole thing about toasters— remember, that was based on fact. At the time I wrote that piece on it, that was before the crash, one in five mortgages that were being marketed by the biggest financial institutions were exploding and costing people their homes. No one would permit toasters to be sold when one in five exploded and burned down somebody’s house. But they were selling mortgages like that and every regulator knew about it.

TF: And those people who had it blow up in their faces, those are the ones we’re prosecuting.

EW: Oh God. So exactly right. Well, to the extent we do [prosecute] anyone. But that’s exactly right. And so the idea behind the consumer agency was to say: structural change. We need an agency that has one and only one goal, and that is to look out for American families. To level the playing field, to make sure that people are not getting tricked and trapped on these financial instruments. And so it was a big shift, and it’s a shift worth thinking about. We took away— Dodd-Frank took away— all this responsibility that had nominally been spread among the other agencies, concentrated it in one agency, and now holds that agency accountable. So you give the agency the tools and then hold them accountable. The reason I think that story is so important is because it is structural. It’s not just a question of, “Gee, get good people and somehow things will work better.” There are structural changes we have to make. . . . The idea, the question that haunted me at the agency was: How do we make sure the agency is true to its mission, not just today with the people that we hire in the first plume of excitement, but 30 years from now, 40 years from now, 50 years from now…

TF: Let’s get back to the mindset of a lot of people. They look at you and they say, Elizabeth Warren, she’s part of the elite too. She was a professor at Harvard. And people would also say, look at the student loan disaster which you talk a lot about these days, the root cause of it is college tuition, which has increased by a thousand percent in 30 years. You look at the advertised price at Harvard right now, I know that not everybody pays it, but the advertised price is sixty grand a year. If you have three kids and all of them have to pay that much for four years— you know what I’m talking about?

EW: I do.

TF: Nobody can afford that. Is it time to do something about college tuition?

EW: Absolutely. Yes it is. But let’s get the right frame on this. Because I think this is really important, and it’s the right question to ask. But start with this: three out of four kids in college are in public universities. A generation ago, state support for public universities was strong enough that three out of four dollars to educate those kids came from taxpayers and the family had to make up the difference for the fourth dollar. Today, that has basically reversed itself. That is, that the states are putting up, just generally across the country, about one out of four dollars and the families have got to come up with the other three out of four dollars. This matters because it is the state universities that are the backbone of access to higher education for middle class families, and I think that’s the place you have to start the conversation. I’m not going to let anybody off the hook, but I think it’s the critical part of the conversation. And I say this— it’s like I talk about in the book— this is personal for me. I graduated from a commuter college that cost $50 a semester in Texas.

TF: Those were the days.

EW: That’s right. It opened a million doors for me. And that happened because I grew up in an America that was investing in its kids. That America is gone. We’re not doing that anymore. So I start there at the heart of it. . . . And then there’s a second piece that we’ve got to factor into the equation, and that is: one in 10 kids in college is in a for-profit university. Actually, here are three numbers. They’re not perfect, but they’re just about right: 10, 25, 50. Ten percent of our kids are in for-profit universities, colleges. Those for-profit universities are sucking down 25 percent of federal loan dollars, and they are responsible for 50 percent of all student loan defaults.

TF: It’s an outrage.

EW: So we are, the federal government is currently subsidizing a for-profit industry that is ripping off young people. Those young people are graduating— many of them are never graduating— and of those that are graduating, many of them have certificates that won’t get them jobs, that don’t produce the benefits of a state college education.

You know somebody to talk to sometime if you want to ever do a separate story on this is Marty Meehan [who] is the president of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. And what he talks about is, particularly, the young vets who come to UMass-Lowell already sixty or seventy thousand dollars in debt without a single college credit that will transfer to an accredited university. Now, think about that.

So who do you think gets targeted by these for-profit universities? It’s kids who are the first in their family to go to college. It’s not happening to the sons and daughters of graduates from elite schools. It’s happening to young people who are the first in their family to graduate from college. Many of them have come out of the military, they’ve gone into the military straight from high school. They’ve now completed their military service. These are strivers, boot-strappers, hard-working kids who are the very kids we most want to make sure the doors of opportunity are open for. You know who else goes [to these schools]? It’s young, single mothers who are trying to make something out of their lives, many of them are working two and even three jobs, who believe that if they can get a college education, their children will have opportunities that would otherwise be closed off, and yet that’s not what they’re getting. They’re getting preyed on by these schools. So I mention this only by way of saying, when we look at college— you’re not wrong— we have got to use the leverage of the federal government investment to bring down the cost of college across the board. But we’ve got particular problems to focus on, both in support for public universities and the resources that are being drained away by the for-profit schools.

TF: Here’s the penultimate question: everything you’re saying are issues that have been important to me most of my adult life. In 2008, I thought I had a candidate who was going to address these things. Right? Barack Obama. Today, my friends and I are pretty disappointed with what he’s done. I wonder if you feel he has been forthright enough on these subjects. And I also wonder if you think that someone can take any of this stuff on without being president. You know, there are a lot of good politicians in America who have their heart in the right place. But they’re not the president. Well anyhow. You understand my frustration…

EW: I understand your frustration, Tom and, actually, I talk about this in the book. When I think about the president, for me, it’s about both halves. If Barack Obama had not been president of the United States we would not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Period. I’m completely convinced of that. And I go through the details in the book, and I could tell them to you. But he was the one who refused to throw the agency under the bus and made sure that his team kept the agency alive and on the table. Now there was a lot of other stuff that also had to happen for it to happen. But if he hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have gotten the agency. At the same time, he picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

TF: You might say, “always.” Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

EW: That’s right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over. So I see both of those things and they both matter.

Yesterday the DCCC was trolling for retweets of the quote from Rolling Stone above that people are buzzing about. Juxtapose Warren’s analysis with Paul Krugman’s defense of Obama in the magazine’s new issue. Krugman, like actual progressives who make up there own minds based on reality, was an Obama skeptic when he ran and was first elected. “I worried that he was naive,” he wrote, “that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.” And, of course, Krugman was correct.

Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center— literally— and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward— and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

Krugman goes on to credit him for the half-assed Affordable Care Act, a baby step in the right direction towards single payer universal health care for the U.S., for “bringing back” the economy without going all Austerity and making things worse, for the actions he took to protect the environment from GOP predators, for pushing forward an equality agenda for women and gays, and or not being John McCain, Lindsay Graham or Dick Cheney on national security issues. And he credits Obama with a job well done on financial reform… kind of. He starts out sounding more like Wlizabeth Warren than like anyone connected to the Clinton Machine.

Let's be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn't. No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.

It's easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn't. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there's a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.

Dodd-Frank is a complicated piece of legislation, but let me single out three really important sections.

First, the law gives a special council the ability to designate "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs)— that is, institutions that could create a crisis if they were to fail— and place such institutions under extra scrutiny and regulation of things like the amount of capital they are required to maintain to cover possible losses. This provision has been derided as ineffectual or worse— during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney claimed that by announcing that some firms were SIFIs, the government was effectively guaranteeing that they would be bailed out, which he called "the biggest kiss that's been given to New York banks I've ever seen."

But it's easy to prove that this is nonsense: Just look at how institutions behave when they're designated as SIFIs. Are they pleased, because they're now guaranteed? Not a chance. Instead, they're furious over the extra regulation, and in some cases fight bitterly to avoid being placed on the list. Right now, for example, MetLife is making an all-out effort to be kept off the SIFI list; this effort demonstrates that we're talking about real regulation here, and that financial interests don't like it.

Another key provision in Dodd-Frank is "orderly liquidation authority," which gives the government the legal right to seize complex financial institutions in a crisis. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We have a well-established procedure for seizing ordinary banks that get in trouble and putting them into receivership; in fact, it happens all the time. But what do you do when something like Citigroup is on the edge, and its failure might have devastating consequences? Back in 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and yours truly, among others, wanted to temporarily nationalize one or two major financial players, for the same reasons the FDIC takes over failing banks, to keep the institutions running but avoid bailing out stockholders and management. We got a chance to make that case directly to the president. But we lost the argument, and one key reason was Treasury's claim that it lacked the necessary legal authority. I still think it could have found a way, but in any case that won't be an issue next time.

A third piece of Dodd-Frank is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an agency dedicated to protecting Americans against the predatory lending that has pushed so many into financial distress, and played an important role in the crisis. Warren's idea was that such a stand-alone agency would more effectively protect the public than agencies that were supposed to protect consumers, but saw their main job as propping up banks. And by all accounts the new agency is in fact doing much more to crack down on predatory practices than anything we used to see.

There's much more in the financial reform, including a number of pieces we don't have enough information to evaluate yet. But there's enough evidence even now to say that there's a reason Wall Street— which used to give an approximately equal share of money to both parties but now overwhelmingly supports Republicans – tried so hard to kill financial reform, and is still trying to emasculate Dodd-Frank. This may not be the full overhaul of finance we should have had, and it's not as major as health reform. But it's a lot better than nothing.

Yeah, better than nothing… better than Republicans, but we should treat ourselves to more… we deserve better.

I Sure Hope Obama Doesn't Give Up On Hope

I hope Barack Obama isn't wishing he never took up this whole president thing-- I have a feeling I would be if I was in his shoes. All that talk about Bush being the worst president in history? It was all true-- and more. And what he's leaving in his wake is the worst situation any president has faced that pretty much any of us alive today-- even John McCain-- has ever seen. When we warned you that everything Bush had ever touched in his life had turned to shit, we meant it-- and when we warned you that there was no reason to believe that that trend would reverse itself when he took over the White House... well that turned out to be true too.

Everything is screwed up, every single thing-- from the economy (have you heard the Asshole-in-Chief say the basics are solid lately?-- to the wars of choice he started and handled so ineptly to the most basic precepts that have bound the nation together. Can you think of anything that is going right that Bush has had anything to do with? I can't.

I'm glad Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have suspended foreclosures for a few weeks and I'm glad Citibank is renegotiating mortgages (for which the markets are destroying their stock). But what Bush and the GOP have done to the economy-- and to the basics-- for the past 8 years is so profound that there is virtually nothing that is going to hold back and equal and opposite reaction. No paddle and you know the creek we're up.

Last night I was reading that even one of the few enlightened Republican officials anywhere in the country, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, is-- as push comes to shove-- reverting to the most brutal and primal form of barbaric Republicanism. Yesterday he urged the Legislature "to allow double-digit tuition increases at all of Florida’s 11 public universities as a way of blunting the impact of state-ordered budget cuts imposed over the last two years." The GOP is always screaming how the worst thing you can do in a recession is to raise taxes. Is the best thing you can do is raise tuition?