Two thousand students, administrators and education advocates gathered at Cal State Long Beach on Wednesday afternoon to send a message to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that the proposed $313 million dollar cut out of the California State University system will not only do harm to students, but it will have an adverse affect on the economy.

Among other things, say CSU officials, the cuts are set to feature a ten percent student fee increase, and could reduce planned CSU enrollment by up to 10,000 students.

The University of California system is targeted for a similar hit.

Republican lawmakers don’t want to raise taxes, said one speaker, but students are “are swimming in taxes, which we call fees.”

Other CSUs like San Diego State and Sacramento State have also held rallies.

In Sacramento, 900 Sacramento State administrators, faculty, staff, students and alumni packed the University Theater and several additional rooms to listen to speakers.

California Faculty Association President Lila Jacobs led a chant of “Stop the cuts,” and then outlined the stakes. “We graduate teachers, nurses, engineers, police, state workers; we graduate the infrastructure,” she said. “When we can’t do our job, the whole state is negatively impacted.”

California State University Employees Union President Pat Gantt added that cuts to the CSU budget will harm all Californians. “CSU is part of the American dream because without a prepared workforce, California cannot move forward,” he said.

Arnold and both Dem and Repub state lawmakers would be wise to listen.

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Today the much-talked about new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author, Harvard professor, Linda Bilmes, is hitting the book stores. It’s called The Three Trillion Dollar War and it explains how the Iraq war, a war that was originally billed as a conflict that would all but “pay for itself,” has already has cost the U.S. Treasury $845 billion out of pocket but, according to Stiglitz, will cost at minimum three trillion dollars in real costs, says Reuters in its article on the Stiglitz book.

What we could have bought with that money.

Contrast those numbers with the last segment on Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast, a story about what happened when an non-profit medical relief organization brought its huge, portable medical clinic to Knoxville, Tennessee, for a weekend, and offered free medical check-ups, mammograms, dental and eye care to anybody who showed up.

In the past, the organization, called Remote Area Medical, or RAM, used to airlift medical relief to isolated regions of the Amazon. Now RAM is doing 60 percent of its work in rural America because, says the organization’s founder, the need here is just so great.

In the weekend that 60 Minutes covered, RAM treated 920 visibly stressed and desperate people who waited for hours in 27 degree weather in the hope of getting in, some driving over 200 miles to seek care. Most were working poor, people who had done what America had asked of them yet were unable to afford basic medical care for themselves and their families. Many who came had insurance, but couldn’t pay the deductible their insurance required. When the weekend was over, and the RAM docs finished speeding as many patients as humanly possible through medical, dental and ophthalmological treatments, at least 400 additional people were turned away.

If you watch the 60 Minutes video, as I suggest you do (it’s a painful but, in its own way, heroic story), or if you watch the night’s first segment on the Ohio primary where Ohioans talk about the pain of lost jobs due to plant shutdowns and a sinking economy, just remember….

…three trillion bucks.

And for what?

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Now no one begrudges the fact that, if you have more income, you get to buy more in the way of expensive stuff—like, say, limos, yachts, villas, Jackson Pollock paintings, and Lear jets. (Okay, we do begrudge it a little, but our better selves know that such wealth envy is….unbecoming.)

We also understand that when disasters strikes, the very wealthy generally have more resources: Better insurance, bigger bank accounts to tap for rebuilding, more minions to help carry the valuables out of the house and into the fleet of Hummers. That sort of thing. But, hey: C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Still, in most ways, disasters have been the great equalizers. An earthquake, a fire, a flood, tornado or hurricane will not examine your net worth or lack thereof before destroying your house. Should a force majeure arrive in your area, it’s an equal opportunity visitor. By the same token, the services available to help those suddenly facing the threat of natural disasters are pretty much the same for everybody. Firefighters, the coast guard, and other rescue workers don’t discriminate by class.

Or at least that’s the way it used to be.

In the coming issue of the Nation, Naomi Klein talks about how far the new Pay-to-Be-Saved ethic has evolved.

It seems that, post Katrina, a gaggle of entrepreneurial types quickly figured out that disaster services for the wealthy could be a profitable business. And companies like our very favorite pay-for-protection entrepreneurs, Blackwater, intend to get in on that profit.

Here are a couple of the relevant graphs from Klein’s article:
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