Informed Comment

College students and graduates in the United States have a debt crisis on their hands, owing a trillion dollars.

Some 80% of university students attend public colleges and universities, which were set up to provide inexpensive education.

These public institutions are increasingly expensive, however, in large part because [pdf] state legislatures have systematically cut their contributions to their state universities since 1990, by 26%.

At the same time, states have vastly increased their prison populations and prison costs, primarily because of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ which everyone throughout the Americas recognizes as a complete failure except Barack Obama, Eric Holder and most other US politicians of both parties. Many of us suspect that the liquor corporations or private prison owners are bribing them through campaign contributions to keep marijuana illegal.

So here is a fix for the student debt crisis and the crisis in public education funding.

1. Legalize marijuana (Belgium, the Netherlands and Peru have not suffered from doing so, and it has been decriminalized in places like Portugal and Argentina with no ill effects; Portugal’s drug addiction rate has actually fallen).

2. Tax marijuana farms and dedicate the tax receipts solely to public higher education and student debt forgiveness

3. Pardon the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in state penitentiaries whose sole crime was using or selling marijuana. Save $40,000 per year per prisoner. Dedicate savings solely to public higher education and student debt relief.

4. Allow multiple sclerosis sufferers to use medical marijuana as a treatment, and let those with cancer, glaucoma and other conditions proven treatable via marijuana by science to use it for that purpose (as even conservative Arizona is now doing).

5. Tax medical marijuana clinics and dedicate their receipts solely to public higher education and student debt relief. (In California alone, pot is a $12 billion a year industry, and a ten percent tax would yield $1.2 billion a year to state coffers, helping save the University of California system).

6. Employ fewer narcotics police, achieve savings, apply those to, you guessed it.

7. Finance the education of new poor but outstanding students with the tax receipts on the marijuana industry, helping restore some of America’s former upward mobility.

These steps would not only solve the student debt crisis and allow universities to lower tuition, but would strengthen higher education in the US and allow us to remain competitive with Europe and rising nations in Asia (we are not keeping up). Our current declining investment in higher education will otherwise cause us to start falling behind in scientific and technological innovation and in cultural contributions, so vital for a dynamic democracy.

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We travelled far and wide
over desert wastes,
and journeyed 
toward the horizon.
We never met anyone
coming from other direction.
When once they set out
on that path,
no one ever returned.

Translated by Juan Cole
from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, [pdf] Whinfield 129

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The intrepid Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian reveals the secret campaign waged behind the scenes by the greasy oil billionaires, the Koch brothers, and other Big Oil interests to fight wind and solar power and to undermine President Obama’s clean energy policy.

In an America where second-hand smoke has led to a ban on smoking in public places because it has bad health effects on others, especially children, it is truly bizarre that we still let people burn coal, oil and gas, which is far worse for people than smoking. Putting high levels of carbon dioxide into the air is causing global climate change, including extreme weather events already. There are some children born today who as elderly persons will live in a world where the average surface temperature of the earth is 2 to 3 degrees C. (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F.) hotter than now, and where the seas likely will have risen six feet to nine feet (2 to 3 meters). Even by mid-century, high winds and sea surges could inundate coastal areas with 4 feet of water from time to time.

And that’s only the beginning. As the decades roll by thereafter, the temperature will likely go up to 5 degrees C. more than now (9 degrees F.). The ultimate sea rise with run through the hydrocarbons is likely to be at least 50 meters (150 feet). If we do go up 5 degrees C. typically in the past every 1 degree C. increase has equaled 10 to 20 meters sea rise (about 30 to 60 feet). We’ll lose a third of the earth’s land mass, all coastal areas, and everywhere will be tropical. Much sea life will die of acidity. Many plants will die. It is not clear that human beings could survive such extreme changes.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is right that the big banks need to be reformed and held accountable. But the banks are a minor problem compared to Big Coal and Big Oil. Where is the activism around those issues? Where are the consumer boycotts of the people who are playing dirty tricks on us?

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George Carlin on the Separation of Religion and State

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Mitt Romney, accused of harassing gay students when he was in high school, tried to get out of the charge by pretending that being gay was not a big issue in the 1960s.

“Romney moved quickly to counter any suggestion he had targeted students because they were gay.”

“That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case,” he said, adding that the students involved “didn’t come out of the closet until years later.”

As Andrew Sullivan asks, “And there was no homophobia in the 1960s?”

Romney’s attempt to deny that there was consciousness of gayness in a past era resembles the denial by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there is any consciousness of gayness in Iran today.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies that there are any gays in Iran. “I don’t know who told you we have this:

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