On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> Free higher ed is kool, but we shouldn't expect state govs -- currently
> whacking their higher ed budgets -- to be able to afford it at the moment.
> For all practical purposes state budgets are a Federal problem these
> days (and for some years to come, at least).
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 4, 2010, at 12:06 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> >
> >> Arianna Huffington, on her web site (the Huffington Post) has been
> >> coming up with various initiatives to kick off grassroots movements.
> >> One prompts people to boycott the big banks and switch their accounts
> >> to credit unions, etc. Doug Henwood criticized this one. While I
> >> agree in principle with the limitations of such a movement as argued
> >> by Doug, I think one thing is to assess its plausibility to address
> >> the ultimate courses of the crisis (zero) and its validity as a source
> >> of popular motion (a small positive number, given the discontent with
> >> the big banks).
> >
> > My critique was quoted in a small Wisconsin paper, balanced with some
> quotes
> > from the president of some punk ass little bank in Wausau. So I looked up
> > the Wausau bank's financials. Most of its assets are in local loans,
> > residential and commercial mortgages, which is just what Arianna loves.
> But:
> > it's near bust - got some TARP funds and emergency Fed support - and
> > actually wrote up its concerns about a $5,000 loan going bad in its last
> > annual report. The bank's fundamental problem is that there's not much it
> > can profitably do locally with its small wad of assets now. If it got a
> > sudden influx of funds, it would almost certainly buy Treasuries and MBSs
> > and lend the rest in the fed funds market. In other words, size would
> > quickly become an issue. So the whole scheme is economically doomed and
> > politically stunted.
> >
> >> More recently (and perhaps more to our liking), she invited students
> >> to blog on their protests against tuition hikes, student loan issues,
> >> etc. This apparently started in California, where things have been
> >> coming to a head. We may have heard about the recent riot in
> >> Berkeley. There's now a scheduled national Day of Action. This seems
> >> promising.
> >
> > Yes, much more so. I've got a piece in the new LBO on college tuition -
> how
> > much it costs and why - that also shows how easy it would be to make
> higher
> > ed free for all. I'll be posting it to the web in the next week or two.
> But
> > subscribers are enjoying it already!
> >
> > http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_subinfo.html
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
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