Open letter to the Wall Street Journal

Editor:

Your claim that the Pell Grant program “flunks” (WSJ, June 18) is twice wrong and insults the millions of grant recipients who thank Pell for making their careers possible. The Pell Grant has not flunked, but is steadily reproving itself in raising women to the majority of college enrollment and degree completions, among other positive outcomes. Nor has it strayed from its original intent. It is higher education that is failing to do its part, and do it well.

In working closely with Senator Pell in passage of the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant – its original name – I know his twin aims were to give the less advantaged access to college and thereby make Americans generally better prepared to work. Higher education has come up short on both counts. Abetted in varying degree by governors and the legislatures, the colleges have put self interest ahead of the national interest, through tuition increases that steadily outpace inflation and undermine college access. This insidious trend has left Pell recipients with less bang for the buck and saddled them with student loans that put their futures at risk.

Colleges undermine their own worth to society and their contribution to national progress by offsetting their tuition increases with too many student loans. As the late chairman of the House Education Committee, Rep. William Ford of Michigan, often said, “Loans only make poor people poorer.” The trillion-dollar loan debt now riding on college graduates and students is no less a threat to the nation’s future than the national debt, because it handicaps the promising talents on whose shoulders that future rides.

The institutions remain slow too at fitting their curricula to domestic job markets and global competition. Six months after the 2011  commencements one fourth of new BA and BS graduates were still looking for jobs, and half of those who were employed were doings jobs that required less than four years of college.

The bachelor’s degree is as antiquated as its name. Both the institutions and the White House need to face realities that demand something else. Higher and faster output of the BA and BS won’t make the American workforce competitive, when our schools trail the world badly in pupil performance in math and science. This failing falls squarely at the doors of higher education, which prepares the math and science teachers. It should come as a challenge to the university as whole, and not be left to the typically underfunded and isolated college of education.

A prime example of the antiquated degree is the bachelor of science in nursing (BSN). Universities keep peddling the aim that every registered nurse should the BSN. Yet for two generations the associate degree in nursing (ADN) programs in community colleges have been delivering the main supply of RNs and bedside nurses, who consistently do as well or better than BSNs on state licensure exams. National competitiveness can ill-afford for universities to track false demand.

The market has proven that universities should chuck the BSN, and build a master-degree nurse (MN) program, tied to a higher exam for licensure, that enables ADNs to complete training in the advanced specializations, from surgery to pediatrics.  It would give the rest of the university a model on fitting other disciplines more closely to the market realities facing Americans in global competition.

Frank Mensel, June 2012

(But do they have a full deck?)

The GOP’s not-so-subtle play of the race card in the 2012 campaign has just become three of a kind. It’s been their game since the 2008 election handed the White House to someone who wasn’t white male.

They played their first card in the president’s first month in the White House. In the spirit of bipartisanship he offered to meet with House Republicans to explore issues of common interest. How audacious of a black boy in the White House to think they’d be open-minded! They met all right, but in a vote taken in advance, the Republicans voted unanimously to reject anything he might propose.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky gave the same card another flourish. With no reservations whatsoever, he said his agenda had only one aim: to make sure the black boy in the White House served only one term.

In light of such partisan posturing, one can only wonder whether the voters have forsaken the principle that in a democracy the first duty of every elected official is to serve the greater good.

The Republicans’ second race card has been the steady drumbeat denying the validity of the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate. Its sole intent is to tweak Americans into feeling that the president “isn’t one of us.”  If they can’t prove the lie that he was born instead in Kenya, they at least can spread the bigotry that he’s one of those island people that our only island State has yet to fully Americanize.

Now, the third race card is being played in an orchestrated purge of voter rolls, led by Republican governors, who want to deny minorities, the elderly, and the poor their right to vote — wherever they can get away with it. They want every voter to carry a photo ID, knowing that the target groups are the folks least likely to have driver’s licenses or any other form of such identification.

The Democrats could counter by getting friendly notary-publics to walk neighborhoods and punch out ID that shows both address and photo for every citizen who asks for it. It would be an herculean effort, but it would make the Republicans wish they’d never started the purge. But sadly, the Democratic National Committee has not so far come up with an offensive of its own making to nullify the purge. It’s much too late to expect the courts to act before the election. The purge clearly holds the promise of putting Romney in the White House and a GOP majority in the Senate and House. Such an outcome would leave the future of the noble American Experiment entirely in the hands of the One Percent oligarchs and the global players who do their bidding.

The election will tell us whether the GOP played a winning hand of three aces, or were bluffing us with three deuces.  It will also tell us whether we’re truly ready for anything but a white male in the White House. Should Mitt win, it will mean that just about any white boy will do, as long as the opponent is a black or a woman.

– Frank Mensel, June 2012

“Money is not people.”

That summation came to me from a senior federal judge, who was expressing his blunt dissent from the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United (CU) ruling. He remarked, “It’s at least the second worst decision in the Court’s history, and I don’t immediately recall one that was worse.”

Will this ruling, which allows corporations the same First Amendment right of free speech that it gives people, become the fatal blow to the democracy that the Founding Fathers envisioned, government of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln phrased it? It is surely playing that way in the politics of 2012, from Wisconsin’s failed attempt to recall the governor, which was buried by a $30 million flood of out-of-state money, to the bitter campaigns being waged for the presidency and Congress.

These campaigns are awash in money already piled far higher than any previous campaigns have cost. Will they prove that money is indeed the root of all evil? Or, will our voters soon grow smart enough to defend their turf and autonomy by voting against any candidate backed by out-of-state money? The alternative is government of, by, and for billionaires.

The irony of the CU ruling, reached on a 5-4 vote, lies in the makeup of the Court, which allows an unelected jurist to stand as the most power official of our government. The Constitution ought to require that any decision that changes or discards existing law must come by a 6-3 vote, the same majority by which treaties are ratified by the Senate. The import of the former is easily as great as that of the latter.

A lawyer who is a veteran of Congressional staff work and private practice believes that the Founding Fathers crippled the Constitution by the oversight of leaving to the States the authority to form corporations, which bear no responsibility for the Preamble’s promise “to promote the General Welfare,” and whose sole purpose is to make money.

That being their sole purpose, it is mind-boggling that the highest Court would confuse them with people. Money is not people!

The bills that propose to dismantle this wreckage could easily become the most significant legislative battle of the 21st century in Congress. It will be a titanic struggle. The nation’s capital and Capitol are heavily painted in the color of money, spread by the so-called Special Interests, which essentially are the lobbying arms of the multi-national corporations.

The multi-nationals live less and less by the rule of law. Thanks to the Supreme Court, they live mainly now by their own rules and the multi-media reach of the propaganda their wealth buys. When challenged by the laws of any nation, their wealth can also swamp any court proceeding, tying up it for years through the maneuvers of the most influential lawyers, themselves members of the One Percent who can easily confuse self-interest with the Preamble’s promise “to establish Justice.”

Will the Ninety-Nine Percent find the unifying theme and the cohesion by which they can prove, once and for all, that money is not people?

– Frank Mensel, June 2012