spending. people don t spend money to advise unless they think it s going to make a difference. talk about 501(c)(4)s that citizens united unleashed on this campaign. 501(c)(4) is another word for a charity. it s a social welfare organization that can spend money on lobbying or on influencing elections. it can only spend up half to this money influencing elections. in the citizens united case back in 2010, allowed those organizations to take it a step further and use corporate money to spend directly in the middle of elections, corporate and union money to say vote for or vote against. now, this money is not new in politics. it just exploded. the court decision wiped away the gray area in our campaign finance law. so now there are no limits to what outside groups can do. and so what we re seeing now is an explosion in that area. although it s a problem that existed before citizens united. i want to pick up on what
statistics. to getting to the first thing you said, at the president s state of the union address, he said we can keep protecting the pell grant, but that s going to skyrocket to the point where it doesn t make sense anymore. at a certain point you have to force colleges to keep their costs in check. and the way to do that is ultimately going to be, you know, a tough decision and holding higher administrators of these colleges and universities accountable for the next decade or so. when we come back, i want to ask what would be the metrics you want to have if selectivity isn t it. i value liberal arts education for itself. up next, is the education that students receive worth the money they pay for it. with the spark cash card from capital one, olaf s pizza palace gets the most rewards of any small business credit card! pizza!!!!! [ garth ] olaf s small business earns 2% cash back on every purchase, every day!
quickly because she s been making the point about on voting day it should be that every vote counts the same. if it s not advertising, if they re putting voter suppression action in the field, that strikes me as particularly troubling. yes. what s especially enraging is that in this time of economic depression so economic waste is being poured into these campaigns. the majority is being spent on negative ads. it would be one thing if this money was deepening political discourse. it s actually cheapening it. they re organizing faith leaders to stand up to money and politics and with ben organizing folks in colorado to pull for a constitutional amendment to overturn citizens united. there s some kind of solution do this? there are a variety of different solutions. i don t think there s any one silver bullet. i think we need to work on a variety of different fronts. just as important as getting the money out of politics, we need to think about policies that bring the people back in,
down the street from you. i think, well, that s the internet. free access that s down the street from you isn t your local college anymore. it is internet classes. which is an interesting point, because as the cost of learning is becoming cheaper, ironically the cost of education keeps going up and up and up. so why might that be? interesting. one of the problems this is what i like to call the u.s. news & world report industrial complex. oh, i know this one. people rank schools on not only how much money they can raise but how much money they can spend, like political campaigns, and on top of that, selectivity. so we re valuing prestige over quality access to learning, over the core competency of the college which is education. the schools are being priorit e prioritized to do the wrong thing. furthermore, we re investing in football fields at university of florida but cutting computer science classes. that makes zero sense. this is not a small point, the selectivity q
debt, the environment, the dignity of immigrants, civil liberties, we see these issues as deeply bound up in one another, and unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you are, governor romney with his 47% comment, would go and borrow money from your parents has done a worse job in showing how out of touch he is with this generation. what i feel we re hearing, in 2012. you re with the roosevelt institute which is taking young people like this, training them for exactly this kind of integrated big thinking. is there any way to make that penetrate our presidential process? i think their absolutely is. i think everybody is right here, that young people are motivated by values. they are motivated by high ideals, and we see that at the roosevelt campus network. we have 10,000 students on 100