Birthday wish

I'm overwhelmed by the large number of folks who have taken the time to write "happy birthday" to a guy who rants so much on FB. My page is here - all readers of DI are welcome to send me a Friend Request. Thank you so very much. It is fun to think that I've just completed an ellipse around the sun. That's a long way to travel. It's great to be alive and it's great to have a wide open future. I've got a lot I'd still like to accomplish and I'm not slowing down. OK, since you haven't tuned me out yet, here's my birthday fantasy: All of us should make a LOT of noise in the coming year, making it our quest to CONSTANTLY remind politicians that we can't have any meaningful discussion on ANYTHING at all until we ban private money from the campaign system. Thanks to the warped values of the Supreme Court majority, this will need to be a Constitutional change, so it's time to get started. Therefore, please write and call your federal and state representatives and insist that they need to take steps to implement clean elections and to undo the damage of Citizen's United and its progeny. I keep thinking back to what I was taught in grade school about why the United States was supposedly special. Back then, it wasn't because we had a big military or because Americans were somehow born special. It was because the founders crafted a system that made it possible for the governed to have a significant voice in their own government. We celebrated that with a national holiday, the Fourth of July. That dream is mostly gone now--we can see the steady stream of government actions where big money thwarts the will of the people--and it's time to get things back on track. Please join any good organization that makes this quest part of its mission. Common Cause, Public Citizen and Represent.us are possibilities. Together, let's shame our politicians into doing what they need to do in order that our national conversation and our national priorities are shaped by good ideas and not by money, certainly not by the big money of an elitist few. Is this too much to ask for my birthday, that this country practices what it preaches?

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How to make college free

Many politicians would claim that college shouldn't be free and that, in fact, the federal government, which is now a direct provider of many college loans, should pile interest onto student loans.   I have two things I'd suggest in response, both of which speak to the systemic corruption of the United States Federal Government:   Warren - college loans     college free Here are more stats from The Atlantic:

A mere $62.6 billion dollars! According to new Department of Education data, that's how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. And I'm not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn't even include loans.

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Goodbye to Net Neutrality

This is yet another blatant broken promise by Obama. He promised that he would be a champion of net neutrality, yet picked a Commissioner who sold out consumers and innovators in order to enrich telecoms. Tim Wu explains at the New Yorker:

The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.

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How to get a member of Congress to listen to your concerns: Offer money

Here's another somber announcement about our so-called democracy, which is on life support: If you want to convince your elected representative to spend time with you, to listen to your concerns, you need to hand him or her LOTS OF MONEY.

Last month, Matea Gold of The Washington Post reported on a pair of political science graduate students who released a study confirming that money does equal access in Washington. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman drafted two form letters asking 191 members of Congress for a meeting to discuss a certain piece of legislation. One email said “active political donors” would be present; the second email said only that a group of “local constituents” would be at the meeting. One guess as to which emails got the most response. Yes, more than five times as many legislators or their chiefs of staff offered to set up meetings with active donors than with local constituents. Why is it not corruption when the selling of access to our public officials upends the very core of representative government? When money talks and you have none, how can you believe in democracy?

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