Fight the soulless juggernaut: Big money, machine politics and the real issue separating Sanders and Clinton

[Ubiquitous]

Camille Paglia

Despite Bernie Sanders being tied with her for pledged delegates
after last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, the media herd has anointed
Hillary Clinton yet again as the inevitable Democratic nominee.
Superdelegates, those undemocratic figureheads and goons of the
party establishment, are by definition unpledged and fluid and
should never be added to the official column of any candidate until
the national convention. To do so is an amoral tactic of
intimidation that affects momentum and gives backstage wheeling and
dealing primacy over the will of the electorate. Why are the media
so servilely complicit with Clinton-campaign propaganda and
trickery?

Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-
plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual–
the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by
the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New
York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s. What you also get with
Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already
dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is
someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email
and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal
statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters
had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right
buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.

Thanks to several years of the Democratic party establishment
strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only
agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, an honest and
vanity-free man who has been faithful to his core progressive
principles for his entire career. It is absolutely phenomenal that
Sanders has made such progress nationally against his near total
blackout over the past year by the major media, including the New
York Times. That he has inspired the hope and enthusiasm of an
immense number of millennial women is very encouraging. Feminists
who support Hillary for provincial gender reasons are guilty of a
reactionary, reflex sexism, betraying that larger vision required
for the ballot so hard-won by the suffrage movement.

The Democratic National Committee, as chaired since 2011 by Clinton
sycophant Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has become a tyranny that must
be checked and overthrown. Shock the system! Here are the flaming
words of one of my heroes, Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech
Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1964, he
declared from the steps of Sproul Hall to a crowd of 4,000
protesters: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take
part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,
upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”

A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the
obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic
Party has become. Perhaps there was a time, during the Hubert
Humphrey era, when Democrats could claim to be populists, alive to
the needs and concerns of working-class people. But the party has
become the playground of white, upper-middle-class professionals
with elite-school degrees and me-first values. These liberal
poseurs mouth racial and ethnic platitudes, acquired like trophy
kills at their p.c. campuses, but every word rings hollow, because
it is based on condescension, a patronizing projection of victimhood
onto those outside their privileged circle. There is no better
example of this arrogant class bias than Wellesley grad Hillary
Clinton lapsing into her mush-mouthed, Southern-fried dialect when
addressing African-American audiences.

Sanders is no Communist, bent on seizing centralized control of
business and industry. He is a democratic socialist in the
Scandinavian mode, where social welfare is predicated on cooperation
and shared sacrifice. Whether such a system can work in the vastly
larger and more culturally diverse U.S. is another matter. The
financial viability of his proposals would certainly be stringently
vetted by Congress, which holds the purse strings of the national
budget. But Sanders’ attack on the crass excesses and unpunished
ethical lapses of Wall Street is a great awakening call, at a time
when the U.S. has disastrously lost its manufacturing base and when
the super-rich have accumulated proportionally more wealth than at
any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

The Sanders theme that is closest to my heart is his call for free
public universities. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father, returning
from active duty as a paratrooper in occupied Japan, became the
first member of his large family to attend college. I was born
while he was still in school and meeting expenses by mopping the
cafeteria floor. The State University of New York added Triple
Cities College to its system in his final year; hence his class was
the first to graduate from the newly named Harpur College, which
soon relocated from the factory town of Endicott to Vestal, near
Binghamton.

The public education that I received at Harpur College during the
1960s (I appear to have been its first second-generation graduate)
was superb, not simply for its excellent faculty and cultural
programs but for its dynamic student body with a large constituency
of passionately progressive Jews (like Bernie Sanders) from
metropolitan New York City. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal
Republican, was pouring funds into the State University of New York
in his attempt to rival the University of California. The cost to
my parents for my four years of college was amazingly minimal.

It is an intolerable scandal that college costs, even at public
universities, have been permitted to skyrocket in the U.S.,
burdening a generation of young adults with enormous debt for what
in many cases are worthless degrees. The role played by the colleges
themselves in luring applicants to take crippling, unsecured loans
has never received focused scrutiny. Perhaps a series of punitive,
class-action lawsuits might wake the education industry up. Until
the colleges themselves pay a penalty for their part in this
institutionalized extortion, things are unlikely to change.

As college became accessible to a wider and less privileged
demographic following World War II, many state legislatures were
initially generous in their funding. But that support rapidly
diminished after the recession and oil embargo of the 1970s. Instead
of prudently retrenching and economizing, public universities
charged ahead and began raising tuition, in tandem with increasingly
expensive private schools. Colleges became overtly commercialized
and consumerist in their pursuit of paying customers. The annual
college ranking by U.S. News & World Report, which began in 1983,
triggered a brand-name hysteria among upwardly mobile parents and
turned high school into the nightmarish, gerbil-wheel obsession with
college applications that it remains today.

The steady rise in college tuition, leading to today’s stratospheric
costs, began in the 1980s and was worsened by a malign development
of the 1990s: the rapid swelling of a self-replicating campus
bureaucracy, whose salaries exceeded those of most faculty. The new
administrators, with their corporate and technocratic orientation,
had an insular master race mentality and viewed faculty as
subordinate employees. The flagrant corporatization of the
university was outrageously ignored by the faux Leftists of academe,
trendy careerist professors who sat twiddling their thumbs, as they
played their puerile poststructuralist and deconstructionist word
games. As a consequence, faculties nationwide have fatally lost
power and are barraged by dictatorial directives from tin-eared
campus bureaucrats enforcing a labyrinth of intrusive government
regulations.

Simultaneously in the 1990s began the redefining of college as a
comfortable extension of the bourgeois living room. Parents expected
a big bang for their buck—bright and shiny dormitories with single
rooms; lavish exercise facilities; cafeteria buffets of restaurant
range and quality. Meanwhile, many large second-tier schools began
to rely on an army of poorly paid and exploited adjunct teachers,
who had to migrate from job to job for survival.

The American fixation on the bucolic residential campus as the
ultimate definition of education has produced our present impasse,
where students expect a homey “safe space” monitored and secured by
hovering parental proxies. European universities, in contrast, focus
on education and are rarely concerned with providing luxurious
amenities or supervising students’ social lives. Similarly, there
are few European parallels to the rah-rah campus sports ethos in the
U.S., which began with Ivy League football in the late nineteenth
century.

Perhaps the most serious problem in American education is the blind
funneling of all high-school students into a now diluted and
weakened college prep program. It’s become a giant boondoggle that
is doing more harm than good, given this stagnant job market.
Vocational high school lost favor in the 1970s, when college-for-all
became the new credo. The educational reformer James Bryant Conant,
who had promoted meritocracy in his tenure as president of Harvard
(1933-53), opposed separate vocational facilities in his proposals
for the “comprehensive high school.”

As a career teacher at art schools, which are vocational in
admission and structure, I must protest the snobbery with which
vocational training and trade schools are treated by the educational
establishment in the U.S. It is irresponsible for teachers not to
be concerned about the future employment and lifetime welfare of
their students. Classes in business and entrepreneurship should be
offered in every high school, especially in the inner city, and
vocational tracks should be available to students who have no
interest in college but want to start supporting themselves
immediately after graduation. We need to adapt elements of the
German apprenticeship system, where industry contributes to
specialized job training while students are still in school.

I applaud Bernie Sanders for putting the urgent issue of free public
universities on the national agenda. Let the private schools gorge
themselves with cash—their pretentious, sticker-shock tuition rates,
which only pampered trust-fund babies actually pay; the obscene
multimillion-dollar salaries of their presidents; their mammoth
endowments (fattening on Wall Street) that are unknown in Europe.
But before taxpayer money is invested again in the great cause of
public education, American universities must embark on a program of
radical austerity, stripping themselves of luxuries and booting
three-quarters of their parasitic administrators out the door.
Every precious dollar must be devoted to the central mission of
teaching and learning.


--
Obama demands the Senate follow the Constitution and approve his
Justice nominee who was picked to purposely not follow the
Constitution.

[Ubiquitous]

only-intelligent-l...@blackhole.nebulax.com wrote:
>On 02/25/2016 01:47 PM, koo...@maricaibo.com wrote:

>> Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote:

>>> Despite Bernie Sanders being tied with her for pledged delegates
>>> after last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, the media herd has anointed
>>> Hillary Clinton yet again as the inevitable Democratic nominee.
>>

>> He's drawing "Crowds"---but nationally---is losing.
>>
>It's typical Leftist Astroturf.
>
>It's like a Hollywood production complete with union actors.

Cue leftist "But-but-but the other side does it tooooo..." whining...