True Men Are Educated
May 10th, 2007The greatest problem with our education system involves College. State Colleges, public Colleges are similar in expense to private Universities whereas they were very affordable in contrast just, oh, twenty years ago, mainly due to decreased funding from the state. It’s becoming far too expensive a venture and that’s coming from someone who’s heading off soon (although, fortunately, with help from FAFSA): another major problem is the usury nature of student loans, which the Bush White House encourages through ignorance.
The Bush administration killed a proposal to clamp down on the student loan industry six years ago following allegations that companies sought to shower universities with financial favors to help generate business, according to documents and interviews with government officials. The proposed policy, which Education Department officials drafted near the end of the Clinton presidency and circulated at the start of the Bush administration, represented an early, significant but ultimately abortive government response to a problem that this year has grown into a major controversy.
Now, as the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry faces an array of investigations into questionable business practices that some officials believe could have been curtailed by the 2001 proposal, the Education Department has embarked on a new effort to set rules for the industry to prevent conflicts of interest and other abuses. If approved, the rules would be implemented in summer 2008, a few months before Bush leaves the White House. The abandonment of the 2001 proposal underscores what some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers believe is lax federal oversight of the financial aid system by a department they say is too cozy with the industry. More than a dozen senior department officials either previously worked in the student loan business or found high-paying jobs in the sector after they left the agency.
“The Department of Education has been run as a wholly owned subsidiary of the loan industry under this administration,” said Barmak Nassirian, a longtime advocate for industry reform at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “They are running the federal loan program for the profit of their friends and not for the benefit of students and taxpayers.”
[…]No one has been charged with any crime in the investigations led by the New York state attorney general’s office and other agencies, but in recent weeks there have been a series of revelations about conflicts of interest and financial links among universities, lenders and government officials. Some Bush administration appointees have said they were unaware of the extent of these controversial practices.
What a treacherous Administration. Which brings us to Newsweek and Harry Truman. Quite the jump, right?
They had a feature on Truman entitled: Wanted: A New Truman and I say, No! Nobody wants that. Nobody except me and a few other people who live in my minority but we are a minority. The American public does not want an honest, straight-forward and common-sensical President — why do you think he left office the least popular President until his time? Besides such an obvious note, there’s another major one to note: Don Imus and the effect on Presidential politics. The American public isn’t willing to listen to a straight-shooter. Oh, sure, we might argue that a serious and candid Presidential candidate won’t call anyone a nappy-headed hoe, and it’s a fine point, but Harry Truman threatened to beat up a music critic and called people sonsofbitches; he threatened to kick people’s asses into the Sea of Japan. You think today’s American public would tolerate that, that today’s media (which praises him without understanding him, though we’ll get to that later) would allow him to succeed? He’d be crucified for being who he is.
People say they search for honesty, but Truman’s not the one.
With regard to my comments about Truman not being understood by most, that’s because everybody talks about his courage as if it were his defining quality, which it should be on a “Get To Know Your President in One Word” basis but not in-depth. Yes, he was courageous, but he was humble. He could admit when he was wrong; he listened to his advisors; he read every book in his library by the time he’d entered high school. He was courageous, but he was humble in the ways a President should be and bold when he should as well. He was humble enough to turn his back on his racist past and start integrating this country through the armed forces and with his recommendations, turning his back on his racist upbringing and Missouri roots; he was bold enough to stand up to the health care industry, War Profiteers, the Republican Congress, those who’d criticize his daughter’s music and Douglas MacArthur.
Truman was a lot of things. Truman is a lot of things. An inspiration for modern candidates, he isn’t, nor is he a man that today’s media would tolerate or understand. They’d call him uncouth, like those in his day did; they’d say he was reckless and moronic, drunk, like those in his day did; and they’d be wrong, like those before them!
What Truman is, though, is the right man, or model, to run this country. Every man and every woman should read a book or two dozen on his Presidency and life.