There’s nothing the least bit radical about one of the “radical” ideas of Sanders and Warren. If anything, it’s a bit old-fashioned.

Probable Trump voters. (Just sayin'.) Photo swiped from

PeopleOfWalmart.com. This has nothing to do with the

comments below. I just needed a picture of something.

Below, a three-paragraphs-long list of some high-achieving Americans, both living and deceased. Glance at all the names and then — quickly — figure out what they all had in common: 

General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Inventor of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk. Actor Tony Curtis. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Composer Yip Harburg. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Composer Ira Gershwin. Author Henry Miller. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Keep reading, because there’s more: 

Composer Frank Loesser. Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger. Author Upton Sinclair, Jr. Millionaire investor Bernard Baruch. Actor Jud Hirsch. Congress of Racial Equality Chairman Roy Innis. Internet Protocol inventor Robert E. Kahn. Trade unionist A. Philip Randolph. Author Lewis Mumford. Keep going, because there’s still more.

 Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Artist Ben Shahn. United States Senator Robert F. Wagner. Psychiatrist Albert Ellis. Newscaster and reporter Daniel Schorr. Author of The Godfather Mario Puzo. Semiconductor entrepreneur Andrew Gove. Actor Zero Mostel. Nobel Prize-winning physicist and astronomer Arno Allan Penzias.

Figured it out yet?

Before I give you the answer, let me mention that this is just a partial list of famous high achievers who had this thing in common. But okay, I’ve probably kept at least a few of my readers in suspense long enough.

They were all graduates of the City College of New York — CCNY as it’s called locally — when it was free. You can find a fuller list here.

And remember, CCNY was only one of the free city colleges. There was also Brooklyn College (Frank McCourt, David Geffen, Dominic Chianese, Barbara Boxer, Alan Dershowitz, Bernie Sanders, and many others.) 

And Queens College (Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon, Joy Behar, Gary Ackerman, Carole King, Marvin Hamlisch, Robert Moog. And many others.)

Free education is 

cost-effective education

Before the squeeze-‘em’-till-they-bleed Conservatives began to choke off the funding, CCNY alone was known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” And judging from all their distinguished alumni, they produced contributors to America’s prosperity, leadership, and scientific advancement far more cost-effectively than Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Each time the city’s colleges turned out another alumnus, they helped to improve the economy, and scientific advancement of the United States.

These days, their funding strangled directly and indirectly by ever-increasing tax cuts for the obscenely rich, these institutions are forced to charge tuition. It’s still modest tuition by the standard of most private colleges, but the cost nevertheless prevents an unknown number of future potential contributors to America's greatness from getting a college education .

Nor was the concept of free or cheap college limited to New York City. The great land grant colleges and universities — places like Texas A&M, Cornell, Ohio State, Purdue, and Iowa State, among many others — were founded on pretty much the same idea. When Americans yearn for the time when America was “great” they are yearning, in fact, for a time when a college education for most could be free, or at least so dirt cheap that nobody had to go into debt for it.

But will rich people

get a "free ride?"

Some, I suppose. However, I don’t hear either Warren or Sanders promising to send your kid on a free four year excursion through the Ivy League. They’re talking about the public and land grant colleges and universities. So if, say, some future Trump kid can’t make it into Harvard or even Haverford, I suppose they can make a stab at Podunk State, and sail through tuition free if any Trump has the brains to survive. But so what?

We’ve had free elementary and secondary education in America for two or more centuries now. So far I haven’t heard anybody complain that Chauncey (“Chip”) Chizzlewit the Third went to public school free, from kindergarten through high school, and didn’t pay a nickel of tuition. It’ll be largely the taxes the rich will pay that will finance free public education anyway, so if they want to take advantage of it, fine. 

Come to think of it, maybe mixing with the likes of thee and me will teach the spoiled rich a thing or two about tolerance. And perhaps they’ll all figure out that they’re not all Very Special Stable Geniuses after all.

The point is, free college education isn’t a radical idea. Preventing free college education is what’s really radical. Harmfully radical, reducing America's competitiveness in the world.

And the so-called middle-of-the-road Democrats who oppose free higher education are so far off to the right, they’re helping the Republicans run this country into a ditch.

John Stumpf, Henry Miller, hapless Wells Fargo employees, and a filthy Cockney music hall song

More than 50 years ago, a ballad in

this book taught a lesson that the

John Stumpf scandal teaches us today.

In 1959, certain books were forbidden in the United States, among them Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Little wonder. They contained graphic descriptions of S-you-know-what-X.

Given that the authorities took to jailing Lennie Bruce just a few years later for uttering language that Donald Trump uses regularly on television today, you can understand why you didn’t want to be caught selling a copy of either of Miller’s Tropic books.You could get busted by the same police squad that otherwise spent its time busting hookers and comedians, find yourself publicly shamed as a “pornographer” in the newspapers, and then get sent to prison.

Which is not to say that Americans couldn’t find and read Miller’s books. All you had to do was go to Paris, where, it was said, the booksellers at the stalls along the Seine, over on the left bank, would peddle you a copy, published locally by an outfit called the Olympia Press.

Unfortunately the word got around too quickly, and by the time I arrived in Paris, a college student in the summer of 1959, the bookstalls and some of the bookshops along the Boulevard St. Michel were flat sold out of Henry Miller, drained dry by eager and porn-starved American tourists.

But I did find a consolation prize. It was an English language volume called Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Bawdy Ballads. Some of the ballads, I later learned at the University of Leeds, where I landed for the fall and winter, were reputed to have been written by some of Britain’s most honored poets in their student days.

I wouldn’t know about the veracity of that, one way or another. What attracted me most about the bawdy ballad book was a song that seems to have had its origin in English music halls, circa World War I. Originally a publicly-performable song, its verses had been altered over time by numerous mischief-makers who frittered away their time trying to figure out what rhymes best with various four-letter words.

I was enchanted by this particular ballad because it was a dirty song with a social conscience. I’ll share a few of the more printable lyrics a bit further on, but first a reminder about John Stumpf and Wells Fargo Employees.

By now you’ve likely heard scores of times about John Stumpf’s appearance before Congress, giving testimony concerning the huge scam that occured as employees struggled to satisfy Stumpf’s demands that they cross-sell the living crap out of the bank’s various products.

If you haven’t, and you have the time to spare, watch Stumpf try to verbally wiggle out from under from the righteous lash of Senator Elizabeth Warren before you resume reading:

Now, let us resume so that we can get to those 100-year old filthy lyrics.

In a desperate attempt to meet their quotas and keep the top echelons happy, more than 5,300 employees opened false accounts in the names of their customers and depositors, and charged them fees for the pleasure of being defrauded.

When the scandal finally came out, the 5,300 employees were fired. Even though they would have been fired if they hadn’t defrauded the customers and thus were unable to make their quotas.

And then it came out that scrupulously honest employees who either refused to defraud bank customers or who tried to blow the whistle in The Great Stumpf Swindle were also fired for doing so.

Wells Fargo employees claim they were retaliated against for reporting unethical demands to meet the company's sales goals. 

Wells Fargo paid $185 million in fines and fired 5,300 employees for creating millions of fake accounts, but a half dozen workers who spoke to CNN say they were fired for speaking up! 

One banker said he refused to open up phony accounts and was fired 8 days after calling an ethics line to report the requests. 

A former Wells Fargo Human Resources official said the bank conspired to fire employees for minimal offenses after they made calls to the ethics hotline. He said:"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them,"

Most of these employees were making $12 an hour. Poor schlemiels. And what of John Stumpf, who demanded all the cross-selling? CNN money reports:

Stumpf will leave with about $200 million -- made up of cash, Wells Fargo stock and options, a CNNMoney analysis has found. 

Even if Stumpf is fired "for cause," such as violating company policy, he would have to forfeit only a portion of that sum.

Which brings me, finally, to a century-old, much filthified music hall song, which demonstrates that nothing, absolutely nothing has changed over the years.

For reasons pertaining to more-or-less sanitary language and brevity, I’ll only quote a couple of excerpted verses here, but they’ll give you the idea. And I think you'll quickly see how all the song relates, a century or so later, to Stumpf firing not only the $12-an-hour employees who knuckled under his demands and cheated bank customers, but also those who refused. 

She was poor but she was honest,though she came from 'umble stock,And her honest heart was beatingUnderneath her tattered frock.

But the rich man saw her beauty,She knew not his base design,And he took her to a hotelAnd bought her a small port wine.

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets all the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame? 

See him riding in a carriage 

Past the gutter where she stands.

He has made a stylish marriage,
While she wrings her ringless hand 

See him in the 'ouse of Commons
Making laws for all mankind
While the victim of his pleasure
Lives by selling her behind

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame?

Why isn’t Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf under Federal indictment for fraud?

                    CEO Stumpf: he pocketed  a $200 million 

                    profit from the misfortunes of Wells Fargo

                     customers that his bank engineered

Some time time ago, over 5,000 employees of Wells Fargo Bank began opening accounts in their customers’ names that the customers hadn’t asked for. There were two million — yes, two million — of these fraudulent accounts, it came out during hearings of the Senate Banking Committee.

The account holders were charged various fees for these accounts  — accounts that they hadn’t asked for. 

The 5,300 Wells Fargo employees who helped commit this fraud were fired, it came out during the Senate hearings. So the guilty were punished, right?

Not so fast. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania noticed a slight, umm, flaw in the testimony of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

As American Banker reports it, Toomey said, “When thousands of people conduct the same kind of fraudulent activity, it’s a stretch to believe that every one of them independently conjured up this idea to commit this fraud. Doesn’t it defy comon sense to think there wasn’t some orchestration of this?”

And who might be leading the orchestra? Senator Elizabeth Warren had a clue. She said to Stumpf:

“While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.5 million shares, and the share price went up by $30, which translate into more than $200 million in gains [for you].”

And make no mistake. The people in whose names those accounts had been fraudulently opened got hurt. The American Banker story reports:

Stumpf also appeared unready for questions about how customers' credit scores would be affected by the scandal. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said the impact on customers went beyond fees and fines because account openings could harm credit scores."What about the folks that may have got a house through Chase and paid a higher interest rate because of that?" Tester asked. "The truth is there are real-world implications here on young families and old families that are going to be put in a poverty situation because of that."Stumpf did not respond how the bank would address the situation, saying "we have more work to do.”

Stumpf’s testimony waffled on and on, back and forth, while he seemed to be absolving himself from any obligation to repay the ripped off bank customers. He had found 5,300 little people to take the fall for him, which was no big deal, Stumpf appeared to be saying, because those 5,300 out of work suckers were only one percent of the bank’s employees.

Senator Warren at one point nearly went ballistic, and fired cannonballs of righteous rage at the evently crooked bank president.

“You should resign,” she said. “You should give back the money you took while this scam went on, and you should be invetigated by  the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I beg to differ, Senator Warren. He should be indicted by the Justice Department. And if he is found guilty — and I have little  doubt that if competently prosecuted he will be found guilty — he should do some time behind bars. How much time?

Well, I wouldn’t want to subject him to the harshness of drug laws that have put some casual pot smokers in prison for decades or more for a single act of possessing or selling a few ounces of marijuana. No, I would not.

Instead, I think he should be prosecuted for each specific act of fraud. For each count on which he is found guilty, he should be sentenced to, oh, let’s be very lenient here — say one measly month in prison, sentences for each act of fraud to be served consecutively, of course. Now let me just, umm, tally this up….

Two million  victims means two million months — those months divided by the 12 months in a year equals 166,666 years. (Not at all harsh considering that if you’d been tried for personally defrauding the bank that many times, not to mention that many drug sales, you’d be in prison for eternity plus a half million years.)

Heck, with time off for good behavior, betcha Stumpf could be out of the clink in less than 80,000 years. I know that may not sound like enough to people who’ve had their credit ruined, who didn’t get jobs or saw their careers wrecked because they had lousy credit,who couldn’t get a house because they had lousy credit, or who may be homeless today as a consequence of the scheme that put $200 million in Stumpf’s personal pocket.

But as I said, I believe in leniency.

P.S. You can find a passel of outrages from the mouth of Stumpf , as well as other outrages, here.

I'm off to a short vacation, but first, a quick hurrah for the Democratic women

I'll be gone for a little over a week, returning to my old haunts in Paris, this time, as many of you can guess, alone. Paris won't be the same without my late and wonderful, and very beautiful girlfriend. Every day I shared with her was one of the best days in the universe.

But I can't go without a shout out to  the fabulous speeches at last night's Democratic nominating convention.

I'm talking about Lilly Ledbetter, Elizabeth Warren and especially Michelle Obama. Each of them, in her own distinct and anything but plastic way, was a national inspiration.

And of course, to the one man who stood out head-and-shoulders, bless you Bill Clinton.

To paraphrase — way, way paraphrase — an ancient historic text, when the Republicans spoke, everyone said, "How eloquently they speak." But when the Democrats spoke, the crowd rose up, prepared to march to the polling booths and assure Barack Obama of another four years.

Will it really happen in November? Was Bill Clinton's speech, on the heels of the moving and inspiring women enough? I can't predict the future. But I will sleep better at night knowing they have been heard.

See you all mid-September.