Thursday, May 07, 2015
But on the third hand,
Corinthian Colleges went bankrupt leaving a LOT of students holding the bag. The Intercept website predictably focuses on 'dark lobbying' that led to federal loan policies favoring Corinthian.
My first impulse in all claims of lobbying corruption is to invert the causation. Most of the time politicians do evil things because they're evil monsters, not because they were paid in advance to do evil. The corporations that benefit from evil will then reward the politicians, but the same evil would have occurred without the 'tip'.
Corinthian may be a genuine exception to the normal causation pattern. Corinthian, though large, was not famous. I hadn't heard of it before this. I doubt that it would have been on the To-Do list of an evil politician unless lobbyists placed it there.
Seems like the more important question is not why Corinthian got favors, but why community colleges DON'T get favors.
If politicians were actually representing the interests of their states and districts, they would be steering the MAX amount of fed funding toward community colleges. That's where the GOOD STUFF is happening.
However! An organization works best when it's struggling and competing. After it has a nice steady flow of funds from gov't or endowment, it stops working. So maybe the current setup, though it feels unsatisfactory, is best in the long run.
¶ 7:55 AM 
