Cokie & Steve Roberts urge Bernie to take a fall for Hillary: Old croakers with outmoded ideas about what is good for America

Cokie and Steve Roberts published an op ed essay today urging Bernie Sanders to back off on his presidential campaign so he won't hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of beating Donald Trump in November.

"If you want to stay in the race to propound your policy ideas, fine," the Roberts couple counseled Bernie. "But don't keep undercutting the one candidate who can save the party--and the country--from a President Trump."

I read the Roberts' op ed essay in the Baton Rouge Advocate, where it appeared under a photo of Cokie and Steve looking like they are in their 40s. But Cokie is 72 years old,and Steve is 73! Frankly, their ideas are as outmoded as their media photos.

In essence, the Roberts are arguing that Bernie should either get out of the presidential race or tone down his energy so that Hillary will be assured of beating Donald Trump.  Indeed, they are pointedly urging him to take fall for Hillary in order to save the Democratic Party.

But most Bernie supporters don't want to save the Democratic Party if it means propping up a corrupt gang of cronies and insiders who are all beholden to the corporate interests. I for one don't give a damn about the Democratic Party. I registered as a Democrat for the first time in December for no other reason than to vote for Bernie in the Louisiana Democratic primary.

The Roberts also urge Bernie to get out of the race or take a powder so that Hillary will be in a stronger position to beat Donald Trump in the fall. But many Bernie supporters don't see Hillary as an improvement over Trump. The Roberts themselves admit in their op ed essay that only 19 percent of voters think Hillary is honest. Even among Democrats, only 40 percent of Democratic voters trust her.

Donald Trump has big negatives for sure. But his negatives are going down in the polls, and Hillary's are going up. I predict by September, about the same percentage of Americans will find both candidates odious.

Cokie and Steve don't realize that the United States has changed. Establishment politics is totally unacceptable to a great many Americans--particularly young Americans. If it is a choice between the Donster and Crooked Hillary, millions of fair-minded progressive American voters will have a great deal of trouble deciding which candidate is the lesser of two evils.

Cokie and Steve want Bernie to take a fall for Hillary

References

Cokie & Steve Roberts. For party's sake, time for Sanders to back off. Baton Rouge Advocate, April 25, 2016, p. 5B. Online version of essay accessible at http://www.uexpress.com/cokie-and-steven-roberts/2016/4/20/time-for-bernie-to-back-off

The student-loan crisis and Presidential politics: Bernie needs to up his game on student loans to attract young votes

Bernie is very popular with young voters. He out polled Hillary by almost 4 to 1 among the twenty-somethings in the New York Democratic primary, and he's done even better with young voters in other primaries. Young people sense almost instinctively that Hillary is just a political hack, and that Bernie has ideas that might really make their lives better.

In fact, Bernie is the only presidential candidate to offer a realistic plan to address the student-loan crisis, which is crushing millions of Americans. Bernie's plan for a free college education at a public college is eminently sensible, and cheaper than what we are doing now, which is to loan $165 billion a year to college students and only get about half of it back.

In contrast, Hillary's student-loan reform plan is to pump an additional $30 billion a year into the nation's bloated and corrupt higher education industry.  That's Hillary's solution to every problem--let's shovel some money at it and make sure the insiders get most of the loot.

And let's not forget that Hillary tweeted young voters last summer, asking them; "How does your student loan debt make you feel? Tell us in 3 emojis or less." Let's see if I can find three profane emojis to send her.

And Cruz is no friend to student-loan debtors. He represented the lender in the famous Espinoza case, in which a bankrupt baggage handler argued that he should only be required to pay back the principal on his debt and should be relieved of the accrued interest.

Espinoza's argument was very reasonable; after all it is the accrued interest and penalties that are crushing most distressed student-loan borrowers--not the amount they actually borrowed. But Cruz's client prevailed before the Supreme Court--a 9 to 0 decision against poor Mr. Espinoza.

So if you are one of 20 million overwhelmed student-loan debtors, Bernie is the only game in town.  Unfortunately, you and I know that Bernie's free-college plan will never be enacted, because too many political interests benefit from the status quo.

But there are other student-loan reforms Bernie could propose that are less ambitious than his free-college plan but which would resonate with young voters.  Here are a few ideas for him:

1) Let's force the for-profit colleges to stop making their students sign arbitration agreements that cut off students' right to sue for fraud.  DOE Secretary John B. King favors regulations to stop colleges from putting arbitration clauses in their student contracts. Bernie could reasonably support King's efforts.

2) The government could require all loan servicers--including Educational Credit Management Corporation and Navient--to disclose the compensation packets for their senior executives and their debt collectors and to disclose on a public web site the amount they pay their lobbyists, the attorneys who hound student-loan debtors, and the recipients of all their campaign contributions.

3) The government could stop garnish Social Security checks of elderly college-loan borrowers who defaulted on their loans. This is a logical extension of the Obama administration's decision to forgive loans of disabled borrowers.

I think if Bernie would add a just couple of additional features to his plan to solve the student-loan crisis, he would see an even bigger surge of support among young voters--maybe enough of a surge to assure a victory in California.

And of course my ideas for appealing to young voters are open to any of the Presidential candidates: Hillary, Cruz, Kasich and Trump could take these ideas and run with them. But Bernie is the only presidential candidate who shows any interest in solving the student -loan crisis.

Ted Cruz: No friend of student-loan debtors

How does Hillary's emoji on student loans make you feel?

References

United Student Aid Funds, Inc. v. Espinosa, 130 S.Ct. 1367 (2010).

Arbitration clauses in student-loan documents:the sad case of Sierra Roach v. Navient Solutions, Inc.

In 2015, Sierra Roach sued Navient Solutions, Inc. for violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  Navient had been pursuing Roach to collect on five student loans totaling almost $69,000--money that had been disbursed to Bowie State University, not Roach.

Roach disputed the debt and claimed she was being repeatedly called by debt collectors. She also claimed that credit reporting bureaus were  issuing inaccurate credit reports about her.

Navient filed a motion asking a federal court to stay Roach's suit and compel her to arbitrate pursuant to an arbitration clause that was buried in the promissory notes she allegedly signed. (Roach claimed not to remember signing the notes.)

Roach's defense to Navient's arbitration demand was that she had signed the promissory note with another entity, not Navient.  But Navient presented evidence showing it had power to collect the debt, and a federal court granted Navient's arbitration demand in an order issued last December.

Roach had some other claims against Navient, but she apparently submitted them late and inartfully. After all, she had sued Navient without an attorney and was unfamiliar with the niceties of practicing law.

Some judges deal leniently with people who go to court without lawyers, but not Roach's judge. She had filed a "surreply memorandum," which the judge refused to consider, saying "sureplies are highly disfavored."

Although it is not entirely clear, she also apparently argued that the arbitration clause buried in the promissory notes had not come to her attention and that she did not realize that she had waived her right to sue when she signed the promissory notes.

The judge did not like this argument at all. In a footnote, he cited language from another decision that said: "[T]he fact that [plaintiff] may have chosen not not to access or read the  language of the Arbitration Agreement does not render it invalid or non-binding."

In short, the judge forced Roach to arbitrate her claims against  Navient.

Scholars and commentators largely agree that arbitration generally favors corporate parties. That's why banks, financial institutions, and student-loan lenders force people to sign arbitration clauses in routine documents. Like Ms. Roach, most people do not understand that they are signing away their right to sue for wrongdoing when they agree to arbitrate.

Two comments on the Roach case:

1) Many student-loan debtors are losing in the courts because they are not represented by competent lawyers. Roach's best argument for invalidating the arbitration clause was that it is an "adhesion contract" that she was forced to sign as a condition for getting federal loan money. Courts have ruled for fifty years or more that agreements waiving the right to sue can be nullified if the party signing the waiver is the weaker party with no opportunity to negotiate and no choice but to sign in order to receive a service. But Ms.Roach probably knew nothing about adhesion contracts.

Distressed student-loan debtors ought to have access to pro bono (free) legal services. There are literally hundreds of thousands of unemployed lawyers right now--and most of them have massive student-loan debt themselves. Their talents should be harnessed to help people like Ms. Roach.

2) The fact that student-loan lenders and for-profit colleges are allowed to put arbitration clauses in student-loan documents and college-enrollment forms is a scandal. Secretary of Education John B. King announced recently that he opposes this practice and will draft regulations that will put some limits on it.

But the regulation revision will go through a negotiations process, and any regulations DOE adopts are likely to be watered down. After all, the finance industry and the for-profit colleges have powerful lobbyists and sharp lawyers, and they make campaign contributions to powerful politicians.

For now at least, millions of people are jeopardizing their financial futures when they borrow money to attend college. Even if they are defrauded or get substandard educational experiences, they are barred from filing suit. And if they file for bankruptcy to get a fresh start, the creditors' attorneys are waiting for them to make sure these distressed debtors get booted out of bankruptcy court.

References

Roach v. Navient Solutions, Inc., 2015 WL 8479195 (D. Maryland, Dec. 10, 2015).

U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education Takes Further Steps to Protect Students from Predatory Higher Education Institutions. March 11, 2016. Accessible at http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-takes-further-steps-protect-students-predatory-higher-education-institutions?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=

Hillary cackles over her victory in the New York Democratic Primary: But the Upstate rubes went for Bernie

If you go to a map depicting how New York Democrats voted in yesterday's Democratic primary election, you will be shocked. At first blush, it looks like Bernie Sanders won a landslide victory. In fact, with the exception of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Long Island and New York City and its nearby suburbs, Bernie carried the whole state.

A  view of a map showing voting patterns in the Massachusett Democratic primary shows a similar pattern. Eastern Massachusetts--Boston and its  affluent suburbs--went for Hillary and the western part of the state voted overwhelmingly for Bernie.

Of course this pattern is easily explained. Most voters live in the cities, and a lot of city people like Hillary.

But why is this so? Why do the voters of Boston and New York City support Hillary while the rural and small town folks back Bernie?

Basically, the people who have prospered in the global economy are urbanites. People in banking and financial services, the media elites, academics, techies and entertainment moguls have done pretty well in the 21st century economy, and they know Hillary will maintain the status quo. Her fans aren't offended by the fact that she compulsively stuffs corporate money into her pants suit because they are doing the same thing.

On the other hand, Americans in the nation's small towns and rural areas are hurting economically; and they are hurting badly. Bernie's straightforward message about economic reform resonates with these people. Even in Oklahoma, perhaps the most conservative state in the Union, Democrats voted overwhelmingly for Bernie with the exception of voters living in two affluent urban clusters. Having grown up in Oklahoma, I can tell you, the Okies are suffering in the post-recession economy. The word socialist does not frighten them at all.

I don't think Hillary cares whether the rubes like her. She thinks she's holding all the cards. But there are more poor people in the U.S. than rich ones. And there are millions of people who aren't poor now but soon will be--including 20 million people who can't pay off their student loans.

If more poor people wake up the fact that Hillary is just a huckster--a shill for the global oligarchs--they will look for someone else to vote for. But Hillary is counting on sliding into the Oval Office before the rubes figure out that the game is rigged against them and that Hillary helped rig it.

New York Democratic Primary: The brown splotches went for Hillary

Oklahoma Democratic Primary: The brown splotches went for HIllary

Ditto for Massachusetts

Karen Blumenthal, Hillary's Biographer, Insults the Intelligence of Young American Women by Calling Them Naive For Supporting Bernie

Last night, as I was driving home across the Atchafalaya Basin, I listened on my radio to a BBC interview with Karen Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton's biographer. The BBC reporter asked Blumenthal to explain why the vast majority of young American women who were voting in Democratic primaries were supporting Bernie Sanders for President, and not Hillary.

Blumenthal admitted that she was mystified by this trend. And then she added that young female Bernie supporters were "naive" and lacked a proper appreciation of Hillary's record in the fight to advance women's rights.

How insulting to young American women!

Essentially, Blumenthal was expressing the same view as the two old crones Hillary wheeled out to scold young American women a few months ago: Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem. Remember Albright's famous quote? "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."

In my view, young women who support Bernie are not naive. On the contrary, a lot of them are politically quite sophisticated.They know Hillary is totally indifferent to the concerns of young Americans and that's why they are voting for Bernie.

They know, for example, that Hillary's campaign slogan, "Fighting for Us," is nothing more than a bald misrepresentation concocted by Hillary's spin doctors.  Hillary isn't fighting for us; who could believe such a wild story? After all, she sat on Walmart's board of directors for six years, and she made $11 million in less than two years making speeches to corporate pirates.  Last year alone, Hillary and Bill raked in $28 million; that's 100 times more than Bernie and Jane Sanders' income in 2014.

Second, young voters know Hillary will do nothing to alleviate the student-loan crisis. In fact, Hillary's only plan for addressing this enormous problem is to shovel more money toward the bloated and corrupt higher education industry. If elected President, she won't rein in the for-profit college industry, which has exploited millions of young Americans.She accepted nearly a quarter of a million dollars from a for-profit education corporation for making a single speech. And another for-profit college company paid Hillary's husband Bill more than $16 million for serving as its "honorary chancellor."

Karen Blumenthal may dismiss Bernie's young supporters as naive, but it is Blumenthal herself who is naive if she thinks young American women need to wise up and support Hillary. In my opinion, these women will never support Hillary Clinton; and if Hillary is elected President, the Democratic Party will lose a whole generation of thoughtful and highly concerned young women voters--both men and women. After all, in last night's New York primary election, people in their 20s voted for Bernie over Hillary by a margin of nearly 4 to 1.

Karen Blumenthal,  doing her Hillary Clinton  imitation (in costume)

References

Katie Dreyer. How Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem Betrayed Women Everywhere. Huffington Post, February 8, 2015. Accessible at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katie-dreyer/madeleine-and-gloria-betrayed-women-everywhere_b_9190676.html

Chuck Ross. Madeleine Albright Tells Young Women Women Voters 'There's A Special Place In Hell' For Them If They Don't Support Hillary. Daily Caller, February 2, 2016. Accessible at

 http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/06/madeleine-albright-tells-young-women-voters-theres-a-special-place-in-hell-for-them-if-they-dont-support-hillary-video/#ixzz46NbEitok

Jonathan Swan. Sanders Wins Young Voters, Clinton Older Voters in NY Exit Polls. thehill.com, April 19, 2016. Accessible at http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/276924-sanders-wins-young-votes-clinton-older-voters-in-ny-exit

Hillary Clinton's ties to the for-profit college industry: If she becomes President, expect the status quo

The for-profit college industry has had a good run. For years, it has sucked up about a quarter of all federal student-loan money, while only enrolling about 12 percent of the nation's students.

The for-profits have reaped big profits, and why not? Some of them spend more on recruiting than they do on instruction.  Most of their revenues (nearly 90 percent for most for-profit colleges) come from the federal student-loan program, and their docile students passively sign the  loan documents that are pushed in front of them by the for-profits' efficient student processors.

And if anyone accuses them of fraud or misrepresentation--hey, no problem. Most for-profits force their students to waive their right to sue somewhere in the enrollment documents.

For years, the for-profits have greased the wheels on their gravy train by making strategic campaign contributions to important people in Congress and by hiring Washington lobbyists to protect their interests. Everyone from Mitt Romney to Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz got a little money from the for-profits, and so adequately regulating this gang of pirates is out of the question.

Will things change if Hillary is elected President? It's very unlikely. Here are a few tidbits of information about Hillary and Bill Clinton's ties to the for-profit industry that come from a recent article by Michael Stratford.

• Bill Clinton worked for Laureate Education, which has for profit colleges all over the world. According to Stratford's article, Bill earned $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 working for Laureate. In fact, Bill Clinton served as honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities  until last year, when he resigned  shortly before Hillary launched her campaign. 
• Hillary earned $225,000 making a speech to Academic Partnerships, a for-profit company that makes big bucks partnering with public universities and turning face-to-face courses into online courses that Academic Partnership oversees. 
• Several of Hillary Clinton's campaign-fund bundlers have worked as lobbyists for Apollo Group, the parent company of University of Phoenix. (And by the way, Barack Obama's "best friend," Martin Nesbitt, is making plans to buy Apollo Group.)

David Halperin, an investigative reporter who has done a good job reporting on the for-profit industry, praised Hillary for taking a "strong, principled stand against predatory for-profit college companies," but I am highly skeptical.

When I was growing up, I was taught that there are only two kinds of snakes: dead ones and live ones. Similarly, with perhaps a few exceptions, there are only two kinds of for-profit colleges: the ones that exploit the student-loan program to the detriment of their students, and the ones that have closed.

References

Frank Cerabino. Failed medical college was reliable source of campaign money. Palm Beach Post, November 2, 2015. http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/news/cerabino-failed-medical-college-was-reliable-sourc/npD6Q/

David Halperin. Top Democratic Lawyer Pushed Pentagon to End U. of Phoenix Suspension. Huffington Post, March 17, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/top-democratic-lawyer-pus_b_9487600.html

Richard Rubin. Hillary and Bill Clinton Mad $139 Million in Eight Years. Bloomberg.com, July 31, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-31/hillary-and-bill-clinton-paid-43-million-in-federal-taxes

Charles M. Smith and Dina Rasor. For-profit colleges are bankrolling Romney to keep to keep student loan money flowing. Truth-out.org, June 14, 2012. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/9790-for-profit-colleges-are-bankrolling-mitt-romney-and-other-republicans-to-keep-their-public-student-loans-flowing

Michael Stratford. Hillary Clinton's ties to for-profit education companies. Inside Higher Education, April 18, 2016. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/18/hillary-clintons-ties-profit-education-companies

The Immorality of American Graduate Education: A Look At the Fields of Law and Education

When commentators write about the student-loan crisis, they often focus on people who attended for-profit institutions. And indeed, almost half of the students who borrowed to attend a for-profit college default on their loans within five years.

Law schools: Declining admission standards and too many graduates for the job market

But people who borrow to get graduate degrees from respectable institutions are also suffering in huge numbers. Let's start with the field of law, where the job market for full-time attorney jobs has collapsed. According to an article by Joshua Wright, there are more than two attorneys for every law job (based on 2012 data).

Many potential law students have figured this out, and law school enrollments have plummeted.  First-year enrollment in American law schools in the fall of last year was 30 percent lower than 2010. As Aaron N. Taylor pointed out in a Chronicle of Higher Education essay, this decline represents the equivalent of about 60 law schools in 2010.

How have law schools responded to this downturn? In order to keep classroom seats filled, many have been admitting a larger and larger percentage of applicants. As Taylor explained it, the median admission rate among law schools in 2015 was 54 percent, "meaning that applicants at more than half the law schools in the country had better than 50-50 odds of gaining admission." According to Taylor, 24 law schools had admission rates of 70 percent or higher! In other words, some American law schools are drifting pretty darn close to having open admission policies.

And as a recent report from Law School Transparency documents, admissions standards are falling at law schools with a number of schools admitting students with LSAT scores so low that they are at extreme risk of failing the bar exam.

All this is happening as law-school tuition has skyrocketed. The average JD graduate enters an anemic job market with $140,000 in debt.

Obviously, law schools should cut their tuition prices drastically and some law schools should be closed. For example, Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge and Texas Southern University's law school have shockingly low admission standards and their graduates have very low pass rates when they take their bar exams. Why do these schools remain open?

Graduate programs in Education: Declining demand and low quality

But let's not just pick on law programs. Let's look at graduate programs in Education, which is my own field.

The National Science Foundation reported recently that that doctorates in education declined 27 percent in just 5 years: from 6,528 to 4,793. Furthermore, in 2014, less than two thirds of Education doctoral graduates had jobs in their fields or postdoc commitments. Perhaps most disturbing, doctoral graduates in Education had the highest mean debt loads among graduates in all doctoral fields. According to NSF, their mean cumulative debt was $36,260 in 2014, and 23 percent had debt loads of $70,000 or more.

We have far too many colleges of education--around 1200. The National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administration recommended closing three-fifths of the nation's graduate programs in Educational Leadership (the programs that train school principals and superintendents), and it is surely right. Arthur Levine, who published a much discussed report on graduate programs in Educational Leadership, found that most of them were competing in a "race to the bottom," with many Educational Leadership programs having low admission standards, low graduation standards, weak faculty, weak research production, and "irrelevant" curricula.

But have universities improved the quality of graduate programs in Education? Have they closed weak programs or redundant schools of education? By and large, they have not. In Louisiana, where I teach, every four-year public institution has a college or school of education, far more than the state needs. And--based on my own experience working in colleges of education at four public universities, admissions standards are going down for doctoral programs. At the University of Houston, where I worked a few years ago, the Educational Leadership program had several doctoral student with GRE scores in the bottom 10th percentile.

Conclusion

The student-loan crisis has many dimensions, and millions of victims. Students who attended for-profit colleges are among the casualties, but many people who obtained graduate degrees at reputedly respectable institutions are also among the wounded.  Thousands of law school graduates and people with graduate degrees in Education have accumulated massive levels of debt for educational experiences that didn't lead to well-paying jobs.

Do we need to clean up the for-profit college industry? Yes we do. But we also need to close a lot of law schools and graduate programs in Education.

References

Arthur Levine. Educating School Leaders. Education Schools Project, 2005. Accessible at http://www.edschools.org/pdf/Final313.pdf

Aaron N. Taylor. Are Financially Desperate Law Schools Using a 'Reverse' Robin Hood Scheme' to Stay Afloat? Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2016. Accessible at http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Financially-Desperate-Law/236041

Joshua Wright. The Oversaturated Job Market for Lawyers Continues, and On-The-Side Legal Work Grows. Economicmodeling.com, January 10, 2014. http://www.economicmodeling.com/2014/01/10/the-oversatured-job-market-for-lawyers-continues/

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. 2014 Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities. National Science Foundation, December 2015. Accessible at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/digest/nsf16300.pdf