Toxic Student Loans—The Ruling Class War with the New American Proletariat By: Ghassan Gus Bridi “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” –Nelson Mandela Which is precisely why the “free market” wants to keep you stupid. Those who run the so-called “free market” like America just the way it is and they have no desire to upset the status quo. These shopkeepers of the “free market” love that Americans can name all of the Three Stooges but can’t name one branch of government. Keeping America stupid makes it much easier to control. Why is America so dumb? In part, it’s because Americans need to go nearly bankrupt to get a postsecondary education. The same “free market” which demands and takes a $700 billion dollar TARP bailout courtesy of the taxpayers, forces a life of serfdom on those same taxpayers if they actually go to a college and graduate school to learn precisely what a racket this “free market” is. According to a National Postsecondary Student Aid Study conducted by the National Center for Education: For the academic year 2007-2008, American students on average cumulatively borrowed $27,708 to earn a bachelors degree; $51,223 cumulatively for a master’s degree; $85,366 cumulatively for a doctorate degree; and $105,705 cumulatively for a professional degree. By the way, this is the only money you borrow that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. If you borrow this money, you WILL be paying it back with interest, accrued penalties, and no forgiveness until it’s dead and buried or until you’re dead and buried. Conversely, the banks can get handouts from working class taxpayers to the tune of $700 billion to bail themselves out of the toxic loans they prolifically sold to a gullible, uneducated American public. But please don’t expect the same courtesy to be reciprocated to the working class for something so trivial as a university education. John Kennedy once said, “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind,” said our fallen president, “is our fundamental resource.” Well, so much for Camelot. Today, derivatives and bonds are more valuable than degrees and books to those who own this country. Coincidentally or by design, with Kennedy’s assassination our country’s fate was sealed with the military industrial complex seizing power once and for all. Less than a decade later we were off the gold standard. Less than a decade after that “conservative” fiscal policy ushered in the era of deficit spending with Reagan, and here we are today—with debt now our primary “fundamental resource” and “education” the butt of Rush Limbaugh’s neo-conservative jokes. Make no mistake about it, this country is owned by a ruling class. Let’s dispense with the canard of this country being a democracy operating under a “free market.” We are a country of a ruling class elite comprised of corporatists and military industrialists, and a working class of uneducated or broke (or both) people who are pacified with a false notion of democracy and free markets. A democracy which offers the “choice” between two parties who are virtually indistinguishable—both bought and paid for by the very corporatists and military industrialists who sell their charade to the uneducated masses—is hardly a democracy. A “free” market which fabricates equity in real estate markets and stock markets where none exist in order to convince the masses they have a stake in this economy when they don’t, is hardly a free market. It’s a divide and conquer strategy, don’t you see? “They” make university education available to a wealthy elite class who can send their children to college and graduate school without saddling them with debt, and for the rest, they create the illusion of postsecondary education accessibility through a trillion dollar debt vehicle which, unlike almost any other debt vehicle, affords no bankruptcy protection to the borrower, who more often than not, is a teenager. These crooks offer these “loans” to 18 year olds before these kids have an understanding of the consequences of that non-dischargeable debt obligation and before they have earned a dime in income. They yoke them with this obligation at a time in their lives when they are brimming with hope for their futures, and as the “free market” carrot is dangled before their teenage eyes. And boy howdy do they pile on the debt! They issue them credit cards while they’re in school so that they’ll fall even farther behind, all while pushing consumption and frivolous debt spending and putting the whole con in a red, white, and blue package practically exclaiming out loud, “it’s patriotic to spend money you don’t have!” Then it’s time to pay up. These twenty-somethings have been bamboozled into serfdom and forced into a “work force” to pay off the debt they now owe to their masters in the ruling class. The lucky ones get jobs in the technology sector building killing machines for the military, or they become “investment bankers” in the “debt industry” so that the ruling class’s economic machine remains greased just enough. The “rest” have to fend for themselves because the other jobs have been exported overseas in exchange for cheap labor to increase the bottom line of corporatists. The “rest” have to figure out a way to pay for their education through menial jobs without pensions. The “rest” can forget about social security, because that was raided to finance the ruling class’s debt spending, their TARP bailouts, and their military. We can’t let the ruling class fend for themselves after all. It’s up to the “rest” to fend for themselves, and if the “rest” fall behind on their payments, Big Brother keeps careful track of it on his computer and marks them with poor credit scores. What a field day for the ruling class! Now, the marked “rest” get to be charged even more interest to borrow even more money—money which was theirs to begin with. Money raided from the taxpayer funded national treasury through TARP. Money raided from the taxpayer social security coffer. Money collected “privately” from the taxpayer through usury. Round and round we go. “They” really are nothing but loan sharks, absent the Tony Soprano New Jersey accent, but every bit as ruthless. “They” make nothing and produce nothing other than debt. Then the coup de grâce… The owners of this country convince the uneducated two thirds of the masses that the educated one third are, with all their accumulated debt notwithstanding, the “elite” class. We’re also wide-eyed liberals, they’ll tell you, because we may be able to tell the difference between Monet and Manet and have a conversation about it. We want to destroy capitalism. We are socialists. We like art. We drink foreign beer. We think we know better than you. We hate America. We hate family values. We hate God. And we’re probably gay. At the risk of being accused a Marxist by a certain segment of my audience, let me just offer this idea: capitalism isn’t the answer to everything. Profiteering doesn’t work for healthcare and it doesn’t work for education. It’s really time we get off our silly “free market at all cost” game and realize there are things this government needs to spend money on that dont involve blowing things up and bailing out banks, and doing so doesn’t make us socialists—it simply makes us ethical, responsible stewards of our future. These are things democracies are supposed to spend tax money on. There is a reason the ruling class makes it difficult for you to get educated and then hamstrings you when you do. Presidents Mandela and Kennedy believed education was a powerful tool for change. Indeed, education can be a more powerful tool for change than a standing army. Of course we can resign ourselves to giving up, allowing our corporatists and military industrialists to just have their way. And as we do, you may find them saying something along these lines: “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” Or perhaps this: “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer dont think.” Do you know who said those things? His name was Adolf Hitler.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 22:35:54 +0000
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