LETTER TO HOWARD DEAN: on the "Culture of Corruption" & Dems

[yurbud]

I am a big fan of Howard Dean's, but I'm wondering what he will do long term to reduce or eliminate the grip corporate America has on so many of our elected officials, that they are not free to oppose the war, support programs we desperately need, or even point out the Bush administration's corruption.

This issue is not just critical at the national level, but down to the very smallest local level.

I teach at a couple of different community colleges, and they have adopted Walmart like employment policies to get around giving most of us health benefits. More than half of all classes are taught by part time faculty, and we aren't given health insurance at the vast majority of schools, or paid nearly as much per class hour as our full time counterparts. The schools do this crying poverty while at the same time giving their executives salaries greater than the governor or even vice president of the United States in some cases.

Worse, our community college school boards are packed with business people whose only concern is getting building contracts on campus for their cronies (the local equivalent of Halliburton), consequently, they put greater and greater percentages of our state allocated money into reserves, to qualify for the bonds that pay for their buildings their cronies will build.

All of these shenanigans happen even as they cut classes and even the length of the semester.

Howard's "Culture of Corruption" dig at the GOP is right on target, but to make it stick, we need to do some fundamental housecleaning on the Democratic side to present people with a real choice, not just lo-cal corruption.