Robert Vaughn, film and television actor, perhaps best known as Napoleon Solo in TV’s Man from UNCLE, long interested in politics, and troubled by the American war in Vietnam, organized Dissenting Democrats. Vaughn’s organization provided the first national forum for Democrats to voice their opposition to the war and to the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Later, Dissenting Democrats merged with Concerned Democrats organized by Allard Lowenstein, lawyer and former leader in the National Student Association. Concerned Democrats became the organizing nucleus for Senator Eugene McCarthy when he declared his candidacy.

To be a Dissenting Democrat was audacious in thought and deed. President Johnson was a Democrat and one who had won election with a landslide in popular and electoral college votes in 1964. He had pursued the most progressive legislative agenda since Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Establishment — office holders, lobbyists, party hacks, hangers-on — could not afford to challenge a sitting Democratic President. The challenge had to come from without, from those who didn’t earn their paychecks as Democrats, from those who were Democrats of the heart not the pocketbook.

Forty years later, President Barack Obama, Democrat, became the first African-American and first northern Democrat to reach the White House since John F Kennedy in 1960. He is supported by majorities in both houses of Congress and a media which remains enamored of an articulate communicator who apparently possesses good intentions. How can any Democrat, indeed anyone outside of a small circle of Fox and friends, oppose him?

Democratic policies and the principles upon which they are based are more important than those who temporarily occupy public office under the party label. Paul Wellstone averred that he belonged to the democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Amusing line, but all too true. The Democratic Party has two wings, that of Republicans running under the Democratic banner and that of the real Democrats. Paul Wellstone was a real Democrat. Barack Obama talks like a real Democrat, but after 8 months in office appears to govern like a Republican.

It is time again for Democrats to put principle first, and to seek the ultimate reality beneath sound-bites and pretty words. Who is the man behind the curtain? The Dissenting Democrat will be a web log striving to adhere to the Politics of Hope even though that politics may have been abandoned by others. The Dissenting Democrat is not for “New” Democrats, “Bluedog” Democrats or for those obsessed with standing in the middle of the road. As Jim Hightower has said, “there is nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos”.

Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime
consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says
Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to
live up to his record in office. “[Obama] says one thing and does
another,” Nader says. “Where has he been for over three years? He’s
had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could
prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one
or two to jail.” On foreign policy, Nader says, “I think his lawless
militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly
astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American
empire, in Obama terms.”

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Ralph Nader to talk more about
President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer
advocate, former presidential candidate. His latest book is Getting
Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win.”

Ralph Nader, your response to the State of the Union address? It could
be President Obama’s last. It could be the beginning of a new
President Obama for a second term. What do you think?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think his lawless militarism, that started the
speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. I mean, he was
very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms,
force projection in the Pacific, and distorting the whole process of
how he explains Iraq and Afghanistan. He talks about Libya and Syria,
and then went into the military alliance with Israel and didn’t talk
about the peace process or the plight of the Palestinians, who are
being so repressed. Leaving Iraq as if it was a victory? Iraq has been
destroyed: massive refugees, over a million Iraqis dead, contaminated
environment, collapsing infrastructure, sectarian warfare. He should
be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were
sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries,
unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and
international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they’ve
come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy. So I think it was very, very poor
taste to start and end with this kind of massive militarism and the
Obama empire.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And on the economy, Ralph Nader, on the economy, your
response to what Obama said last night?

RALPH NADER: A lot of good-sounding words. He’s very good at that. I’m
glad he focused on Wall Street abuses on more than one occasion. I’m
glad that he focused on renewable energy. But notice that he just
mentioned climate change but didn’t go anywhere on that one. He still
is not able to use the word “poverty.” It’s always the middle class,
which is shrinking into poverty. But you’ve got 60, 70, 80 million
people living in poverty in the United States, and child poverty.

And the most amazing gap was his promise in 2008 to press for the
raising of the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 by 2011. So,
he went for equal pay for equal work for women, but millions of people
in this country, one out of every three full-time workers, are earning
Wal-Mart wages, many of them not far over the $7.25 rate. Now, the
$9.50 minimum wage would still be less in inflation-adjusted terms
than it was in 1968, when worker productivity was half of what it is
today.

So, a lot of his suggestions, like the attitude toward foreign
trade—well, he said that in 2008 he wanted to revise NAFTA. He didn’t
lift a finger. So how credible are his words vis-à-vis China, for
example, in the trade area and importing hazardous products into this
country? How credible are his words? How credible are his words when
he says he wants to start a financial crimes unit in the Justice
Department? I mean, what does that mean, unless he demands a much
larger budget for prosecutors and law enforcement officials against
the corporate crime wave? Maybe he needs a subscription to the
Corporate Crime Reporter to tell him that we’ve been through these
kinds of rhetorics before by prior presidents. They’re going to
establish an enforcement unit here and there, but without a major
budget, it’s going to go nowhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play President Obama’s announcement last night of
a new unit devoted to investigating major financial crimes.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We’ll also establish a financial crimes
unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale
fraud and protect people’s investments. Some financial firms violate
major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a
repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast
majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the
right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud
count. And tonight I’m asking my attorney general to create a special
unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to
expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of
risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will
hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to
homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt
so many Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama announcing that New York
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will head this unit. I’m going back
to the—to August, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman being
kicked off a 50-state task force negotiating a possible settlement
with the nation’s largest mortgage companies, the move coming just a
day after the New York Times reported that the Obama administration
was pressuring Schneiderman to agree to a broad state settlement with
banks over questionable foreclosure tactics. Ralph Nader, your
response?

RALPH NADER: Well, that’s the double standard that he’s such an expert
at, Obama. He says one thing and does another. Where has he been for
over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing
laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t
sent more than one or two to jail. So, it is important to strengthen
the corporate criminal laws through congressional legislation, but
what has he done? This financial crimes unit, that’s like putting
another label on a few doors in the Justice Department without a real
expansion in the budget.

But then, when he said to the American people, “no more bailouts, no
more handouts, and no more cop-outs” — but that’s what’s been going
on. And it’s going on today and it went on last year under his
administration. Washington is a bustling bazaar of accounts
receivable. They’re bailing out and they’re handing out all kinds of
subsidies to corporations—handouts, giveaways, transfer of technology,
transfer of medical research to the drug companies without any
reasonable price provisions on drugs, giveaway of natural resources on
the federal lands. You name it, it’s still going on. And as far as a
cop-out, how about his deferred prosecution gimmicks with these
corporations under the Justice Department, where they never have to
plead guilty, they never have to make themselves vulnerable to civil
lawsuits so they pay back the American people what they’ve stolen from
them?

So, obviously, State of the Union speeches are full of rhetoric,
they’re full of promises, but it’s good to measure them against the
past performance of the Obama administration and what his promises
were in 2008. They don’t really stand up very well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ralph Nader, I want to turn to the Republican response
to the State of the Union address. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a
former budget director under President George W. Bush, delivered the
response to his address, to Obama’s address. He slammed Obama for
halting the Keystone XL pipeline project that would transport oil from
Canada to Texas, equating the move to a, quote, “pro-poverty policy.”

GOV. MITCH DANIELS: The extremism that stifles the development of
homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would
employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no
improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a
pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth
approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of
private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the
public revenues to pay our bills.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ralph Nader, your response?

RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, the XL pipeline is basically shipping
very dirty Albertan oil down through the United States, over very,
very sensitive aquifers and other environmental conditions, down to
the Gulf in order to ship it abroad. That’s the big farce of this
pipeline project. It’s not going to be brought to make this country
more reliant on Canada instead of the Middle East. It’s basically an
export pipeline.

And the second is, Mitch Daniels would have done the public a great
service, in his speech, if he would have urged the corporations in
this country, who are sitting on $2 trillion of cash, like Cisco and
Apple and Google, to start giving some of that cash back to
shareholders in terms of dividends and to pension funds and mutual
funds, which would increase consumer demand and create more jobs, just
the way a minimum wage increase would increase consumer demand to
create more jobs. Instead, he didn’t say that. And Obama has
constantly restricted any kind of stimulant to tax breaks, to tax
incentives, to tax reductions, which of course will not do much to
build up the government’s resources for a major job-producing public
works program in every community, good-paying jobs repairing America—
schools, bridges, public transit, drinking water systems—jobs that
cannot be exported abroad. So, we need to develop a very concrete
critique of these politicians’ statements up against what they could
do if they had the courage of their office.

Imagine Obama never mentioning the Occupy movement. Imagine Obama
never mentioning the Occupy Wall Street movement, the main citizen
awareness movement to be coupled with his alleged concern with Wall
Street abuses. And yet he talks about advancing human dignity for all
people abroad, and he never talks about a major human dignity
initiative, the Occupy initiative, based on peaceful resistance to
oligarchy and plutocracy. He’s a political coward. He’s got to repair
back to the Oval Office and ask himself why he can’t stand for the
people in this country who are really aware and trying to improve our
democracy and advance justice and make government and corporations
accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, you have written a new book called Getting Steamed
to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win. People may be
listening to you right now and agreeing with a lot of what you are
saying, and also saying, “What is the alternative here? Mitt Romney?
Newt Gingrich?” What is your response to that?

RALPH NADER: Well, this is the book, and I’m going to drop it off at
the White House soon. I think he should read it, because the left is
not making any demands on Obama because they’re so freaked out by the
Republicans and their crazed rhetoric on their debates. Well, if that
is going to continue for 2012, that means the corporations are pulling
on Obama and the Democratic Party. The Republicans are pulling on
Obama and Democratic Party, because they’re getting all the media,
because they have a vibrant primary process, and there’s no primary
challenge to Obama, so the progressive agenda is not getting any media
at all, week after week.

So the alternative, Amy, is for the left, such as they are —
progressive, liberal people, I like to call them “justice seekers” —
to make demands on Obama, to make demands for improving the rights of
labor, improving the rights of small farmers, improving the rights of
small business, the environmental demands that need to be made, the
crackdown on corporate crime, a whole panoply of corporate reform
agenda, the kind of crackdown on these global corporations that have
abandoned America and shipped jobs and industries to fascist and
communist regimes who know how to keep workers in their place.

But there is no pull, because they’re so freaked out by the
Republicans. So, one can really say the Republicans could sit around
in a smoke-filled room and say, “Let’s be even more crazed. Let’s be
even more corporatist.” This will create a good vacuum for the
Democrats to move into, because both parties are dialing for the same
corporate dollars, and it will bring the left to their knees, because
they’ll say, “We’ve got nowhere to go.”

Well, the reason why this speech was so failing, especially in foreign
and military policy, the reason why it was so failing is because Obama
doesn’t have to worry about tens of millions of people who call
themselves progressives or liberals, because they have signaled to him
that they got nowhere to go. Well, I think if they believe they got
nowhere to go, that they don’t want to vote for a third party or Green
Party, they can at least, in April, May, June, hold his feet to the
fire and present him with a set of progressive demands, in order to
tell him that they do have a place to go: they can stay home. And
that’s what hurt the Democrats in 2010. People can just stay home.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I want to thank you for being with us. His
book is called Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It
Together to Win.

Transcript from DEMOCRACY NOW www.democracynow.org

This morning I read that an ardent member of the Occupy Los
Angeles movement has been arrested and charged with
lynching. You might think the protester, Sergio
Ballesteros, attacked and hung someone. After all,
California’s anti-lynching law was designed to protect
minority defendants in police custody from vigilante lynch-
mobs. But no, the police have used the law which defines
lynching as “taking by means of riot any person from the
lawful custody of any peace officer” to charge a non-violent
activist with this felony for allegedly trying to keep a
fellow demonstrator from being arrested.

I’m drowning in irony. First, given Southern California’s
history of troubled race relations, and the long-term
institutionalized racism of the Los Angeles Police
Department, I suspect that city had its fair share of
lynching in the 19th and early 20th century, and that this
law provided the victims with virtually no protection
because the police did not enforce it. Second, given the
heroic pacifism of the Occupy Movement in the face of
mounting police violence I doubt any of the cops holding the
demonstrators in their custody could legitimately be called
“peace officers.” Finally, as far as I can tell from the
videos, it was the police, not the demonstrators, who were
rioting.

But then again, is it really that surprising that a law
designed to protect the oppressed, should be turned on its
head and employed against those who are rebelling against
their oppressors? I’m sure this isn’t news to the OWS folks
whose principle slogan is “we are the 99%.” Like the
lynching law, the 14th Amendment was designed to aid the
newly freed slaves. However, today its main purpose has
been perverted to protect the “personhood” of the 1%’s
corporate creatures.

I wrote here in early November that: “It is not surprising
that OWS became intolerable to the authorities the movement
refused to recognize. Such public naming of capitalism as
Public Enemy Number One could not be countenanced… If the
movement persists and grows, as I hope it will, the attacks
upon it are sure to intensify.”

This new felony charge is a manifestation of that
intensification. Hopefully the community will rally to
Ballesteros’ defense. The police have chosen a target they
may regret. When Ballesteros is not occupying Los Angeles
he’s building homes with Habitat for Humanity, volunteering
at a summer camp for children in Appalachia, studying urban
education at UCLA, and mentoring Los Angeles-area kids. But
convicting Sergio may not be the prosecutor’s primary goal.
This felony charge is designed to scare away those who might
get involved. However, strong-arm tactics do not appear to
be intimidating the OWS folks. I hope this attack will
backfire, and attract even more people to “the 99%
movement.”

— Robert Meeropol
from PORTSIDE a news and information service of the
Committees for Correspondence

“The Foreclosure Crisis: A Nation in Denial,” is the
title of a commentary by Bruce Judson on Huffington
Post January 9. “As we start the New Year, the
executive branch and Congress continue to pretend the
gravest risk to our economy and social stability does
not exist: the ongoing foreclosure crisis,” wrote
Judson, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Yale
Entrepreneurial Institute and author of It Could Happen
Here: America on the Brink. “The financial crisis began
with the housing crisis and it will not end until we
resolve housing. Government policymakers who seemingly
ignore this basic fact are leading the nation to
another potential catastrophe.”

In 2007, only a few observers were warning of the
devastating effect all this was having, especially on
African American and Latino communities from one end of
the country to the other.

“Today, an estimated 29 percent of all homes with
mortgages are underwater. In addition, at least one
respected analyst estimates that a total of 14 million
homes will be foreclosed on from 2007 to the end of the
crisis,” Judson wrote. “This represents a hard-to-
imagine one in every four mortgages. With foreclosures
increasing, there is now such a looming imbalance of
supply and demand that, as the Fed notes, further
decreases in home prices are likely. Some believe home
price reductions of another 20 percent are likely. This
would, in all likelihood, have disastrous consequences
on at least three fronts – and ripple effects that are
impossible to predict.”

Judson wrote, “What is shocking is the almost total
lack of attention the administration has paid to
suffering homeowners. It’s hard for me (and apparently
Chairman Bernanke) to understand how the administration
can possibly hope to revitalize the economy without
seriously addressing the overhang of consumer housing
debt. Moreover, the failure to address the risk this
poses for a broader economic catastrophe borders on the
inexcusable.”

“If President Obama is serious about saving the middle
class and reducing income inequality, the
administration needs to be far more aggressive in
developing policies to keep homeowners as homeowners.
As I have written before, this was one of FDR’s central
goals in the New Deal. Detailed proposals for
addressing this extraordinary risk do exist. However,
they will require a determined effort. There are
solutions, but they are not simple.”

“What is most important right now is that we recognize
we are in a lifeboat that will not reach land,” wrote
Judson. “We need to focus on implementing a meaningful
solution to the problem. A clock is ticking and
Washington needs to acknowledge that a witching hour is
approaching.”

Three years ago, with much fanfare, the Obama
Administration launched the Home Affordable
Modification Program with a target of assisting over 3
million distressed homeowners. As of the end of the
year, it is said to have aided somewhere in the
vicinity of 750,000. One problem is that it’s voluntary
and the bankers aren’t in a voluntary mood.

Excerpt from http://www.blackcommentator.com/455/455_lm_foreclosure.php

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has never been too keen on the Constitution anyway, is eager to please. So Rahm rammed through an new ordinance in the Windy City, one which essentially criminalizes any activity protected by the First Amendment. No one can congregate without a permit. No one can carry a placard unless that placard has been submitted to the City for approval. Anyone seeking to exercise freedom of speech or assembly must limit the numbers of their participants, obtain permits, get approval of placards, show evidence of insurance in the amount of a million dollars indemnifying the City and agree to demonstrate only in approved areas (“free speech zones”). Failure to comply will result in $ 1000 per person fines and 10 days in the hoosecow.

Virtually every demonstration in Chicago in the last 30 years would have been banned if this ordinance had been in effect then, having just completed the celebration of Martin Luther King, it should be noted that Rev. King’s Chicago march for equality would have been prohibited under Rahm’s law.

Children, at one time in the 20th century, the country we live in was a free nation, it was wonderful, you would have loved it.

Remember, Kids, no one is to touch you in your private places except the TSA Agent. Transport Security Administration (TSA) Agents can fondle and molest you in your private parts and there is nothing Daddy and Mommy can do about it. That’s because the Constitution that you learned about in school doesn’t protect us anymore. Under the law the TSA perverts can molest you at will and if Daddy complains they can take him away and no one will ever see him again. We Americans must prove we are innocent because the TSA presumes we are all guilty of being terrorists.

DANNY WEIL, Truth Out
News analyst and writer for Project Censored

Targeting the Most Vulnerable in Society: Disposable Youth, Surplus Populations of Unemployed, Veterans From Illegal Wars and the Homeless

The General Accounting Office (GAO) has investigated the for-profit educational industry’s marketing tactics on several occasions. They pose as students and investigate how these for-profit predatory colleges actually recruit students. They have found that aggressive military-style recruitment is the norm.(4) Holly Petraeus, CIA Director David Petraeus’ wife and an outspoken advocate for military families, told a Senate panel back in November 3, 2011, that for-profit colleges were actively targeting military personnel and their families – she testified that they were even marketing private loans with inflated interest rates.(5) For-profits have even been caught attempting to recruit the homeless and their literature and advertisements can be found at welfare offices, unemployment offices and even at public housing sites where college recruiters often can be found driving through poor urban sectors of major cities in slow moving vans looking for students as though they were low hanging fruit.(6) They do this, they say, to help the minority and economically disadvantaged. In reality, they are leading these poor youth, who face little in the way of civilian life, to economic and social slaughter.

The parallel between for profit colleges and subprime mortgage lenders is not coincidental. To begin with, for years, regulators and the Department of Justice and the DOE have been warned about “an epidemic” of for-profit educational fraud, misrepresentation and illegal activities. Oversight agencies and government looked the other way or actively worked to deregulate in favor of the predatory universities and colleges.

Secondly, both have been driven by Wall Street financial interests seeking new sources of investment for profit maximization. Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, who has studied the for-profit educational sector for many years, spoke of Wall Street’s increasing financialization of the $500-billion-dollar public educational sector:

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education. These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”[7]

Another analogue with the subprime mortgage fraud can be found in comparing the regulating or accrediting agencies that give their blessing to the for-profit colleges to do business as educational entities with regulating agencies like Warren Buffet’s, Moodys or Standard and Poor. As we know now, the rating agencies that were supposed to oversee and rate the packaged toxic bonds Wall Street sold and issued so they could assure investors of their safety, have themselves had conflicts of interest. They were being paid in myriad ways by Wall Street financial capitalists to dupe investors (pension funds, entire countries, charities and individuals to name a few) into thinking that that the “toxic asset” bonds that Wall Street was selling merited the highest safety rating of AAA. The same is true with the accrediting agencies, many of whom work diligently in showering legitimacy to what would otherwise be criminal enterprises. It’s all legal and it is all part and parcel of neoliberalism, the late stage of capitalism that we find ourselves in where 40 percent of the US economy is financialized.

Kaplan University: Blood Bank for The Washington Post

An examination of one of The Washington Post’s subsidiaries, Kaplan University, provides a peek into the business of for-profit predatory colleges.

As this story will report, influenced by corporate money, the job of the coin-operated politicians is to facilitate the transfer of tens of billions of dollars of public money, in the form of taxpayer-subsidized government-guaranteed loans and grants, to private, yet publicly traded, for-profit corporations which produce little or no value, as demonstrated by low graduation rates at these institutions. Under neoliberalism, the political class also works to pass favorable regulations for the industry and stave off onerous ones. The government is virtually turned into a corporate board room, to do the corporation’s business. In this way, they use the government to pass favorable public policy and to collect revenues to be turned over to the for-profit predatory colleges and universities and to assure that the legal and regulatory climate and landscape is favorable to the industry. The politicians are paid to represent the interests of the corporate for-profit educational industry and they represent their constituency quite nicely.

Lavish Compensation

According to Washington Post Company (WaPo) 10-K annual reports, WaPo paid Kaplan Incorporated executives $289 million dollars related to stock option payouts between 2003 and 2008.(8) In 2003, a $119 million executive payout was double Kaplan Incorporated’s entire operating income of $58 million. Such compensation is outlandish, even by Wall Street standards. In light of the high student default rates, rising student loan debts and low student graduation rates, the compensation is grotesquely unconscionable.(9) Student loan debt is now more than one trillion dollars, surpassing the total amount owed in credit card debt.

On November 19, 2008, Kaplan Incorporated’s 29-year-old CEO, Jonathan Grayer, resigned from the for-profit university division. In return, WaPo gave him a severance package worth more than $76 million.(10)

The golden parachute included payments of $10 million paid in November of 2009 and another $20 million shelled out in November of 2011. The $20 million due Grayer in November 2011 was greater than Kaplan’s entire 2011 third quarter operating income of $18 million.(11) The majority of the sumptuous compensation was paid for by taxpayers through Pell Grants and Stafford Loans the company gets through students. Kaplan, like all for-profit predatory universities and colleges, socializes the cost of doing business and then privatizes the private profits through outlandish compensation packages, stock sales, bonuses and the like. In this way. they also parrot the subprime mortgage industry. When the student defaults, Kaplan doesn’t care; it has already received the tax monies.

Ironically, at the same time WaPo was paying out over $76 million to Grayer in bountiful compensation deals, Washington Post newspaper editor Marcus Brauchli was busy shuttering news bureau offices, laying off newsroom staff and eliminating whole sections of the Post’s Sunday newspaper in an attempt to save money. This is because the newspaper business is no longer profitable except as a propaganda organ for Donald Graham, the CEO. The real profits lie in the for-profit educational industry, technology, student testing, and other media. Graham knows this.

On June 2, 2011, the DOE issued new regulations governing for-profit colleges, regulations which Mr. Graham personally had aggressively lobbied to weaken. Mr. Graham, in fact, was a leading part of a fierce battle waged for more than a year now against greater US DOE regulation of the $30-billion-dollar for-profit educational industry. Graham and his for-profit allies spent more than $4.5 million on lobbying during the first three months of 2011 alone.(12) This put the industry on pace to spend more than twice what it spent in 2010 on pitched battles with the DOE and their feeble attempt to regulate the industry. The investment evidently paid off, for The Washington Post stock was saved from outright decimation and the regulations were severely weakened.

Timing is everything. On June 6, just two business days after the issuance of the new and weakened regulations, the Graham family began cashing in more than $12 million in stock.(13)(14) This was part of over $70 million in stock cashed in by the Graham family between 2008 and 2011.(13)*

See the complete article at TRUTH OUT http://truth-out.org/kaplan-university-pays-executives-quarter-billion-dollars/1326222281

The United States, however, is the leading spender when it comes to diverting public tax funds and resources to subsidizing the well-to-do. The Federal, state and local governmental budgets pump out BILLIONS for corporate welfare. But in addition to these funds, the U.S. Government uses the tax system to allocate funds via tax deductions and credits to those who aren’t poor or needy.

Over the next 5 years, the Federal Budget will be reduced (and the debt increased) by the following sums:

Employer-based healthcare $ 1.07 TRILLION
Mortgage-interest deduction 609 BILLION
Step-up capital gains 357 BILLION
401-k deduction 356 BILLION
Rental income exclusion 303 BILLION
Charitable deduction 249 BILLION
Accelerated depreciation 270 BILLION
Ordinary capital gains 256 BILLION

Just think of where the budget debate would be if the $ 3.5 TRILLION
that could have been collected in revenues had not been diverted
to the interests of those in the top 10% of earners.