http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson03162010.html
The Student Loan Sharks
Senators Against Students
By DAVID SWANSON
As long as we're going to dump most of our money into wars and the military and Wall Street and health insurance bailouts, students are going to have to go into debt to afford college. But it would cost the students less and the government less, if private companies were not permitted to act as middlemen profiting off public loans to students.
One of the companies so profiting, Sallie Mae, is based here in Virginia and funnels millions of dollars from its profits into lobbying to make sure the free money keeps flowing. Senators Warner and Webb have chosen to side with the parasites rather than the students, but disguised their choice as one of concern for jobs, the jobs of the loan sharks who could find respectable work in a better educated society. I grew up in Reston, where Sallie Mae's jobs are, and I know there are people there who will find a way to publicly say thank you for Sallie Mae's help in driving our nation deeper into ignorance and debt.
But our representatives are in Washington, not Reston, and they represent their donors, the media, and the president, not us. Student lending is an issue on which the White House officially supports good legislation. But no congress members are getting hounded with promises or threats the way they do when it comes to funding wars. Clearly the corporate media couldn't care less. Educated students, after all, are statistically the least likely to watch the crap we call television news. And the legalized bribes always weigh against public needs, not for them.
While I would choose to end the wars and make college free, or -- as a distant second choice -- to make Webb and Warner pay off students' loans by cleaning Virginia's highways in orange jumpsuits for $0.25 an hour, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act is admirable for its sensible approach to keeping student debt as low as the military will tolerate. It's also admirable for the remarkable irony that -- were it not for the corruption of Webb (202-224-4024) and Warner (202-224-2023) and a few other senators -- this legislation might be included in a health insurance bill that takes the exact opposite approach.
I recall watching a performance at the White House several months back at which the president answered pre-approved questions from the public about healthcare and the economy and student loans. His argument for cutting out the student-loan middleman and saving money was direct and coherent, just as his support for single-payer healthcare had been when he served as a state senator in Illinois. Now his approach to healthcare is to empower the parasitical middlemen, the insurance companies, and require us to hand our money to them.
Yet, rarely is the excuse used that our society could not find respectable jobs for former employees of the Sickness Industry. Instead, the claim is repeated so many times that it begins to sound plausible, that we, the customers, are actually too comfortable with our victimizers to give them up. If it becomes necessary, you'll begin to hear about the public's affection for student loan companies too. That may sound crazy now, but that's only because you haven't heard it 10,000 times yet. Our trepidation about parting with HMOs would have sounded like lunacy before the "health insurance reform" debate got going.
And let’s not imagine that the health insurance corporations will succeed in passing a public mandate to buy their useless and murderous products without every other industry noticing. We may soon learn about the public's deep attachment to all sorts of crap that just won't sell. "Education reform," anyone?
David Swanson
I would not say we have become complacent with our debt managers I think that at some point, some of us just stop fighting. It hurts too much. Some of us, however, don't know when to stop fighting, and just like some of the dogs Buck saw amongst his fellow captured dogs in
- Call of the Wild
. Those who would not buckle under were beaten to death. I say, let us be beaten to death because literally and metaphorically it is much better that people see carnage to understand the severity of a crisis than to see complacency and to adopt an attitude of pity. Those who have the power to change a wrong and wring their hands must be first taught, and then asked. If they will not then aid our cause, then they are not worth the votes we give them.
It sounds like your senators over there in Virginia are sold out. I am also kind of confused as to how the military gets put in that argument about keeping "student loan debt as low as possible"
Obama has sold out as well. He sold out the moment he put bank executives of the very banks that had to be bailed out due to bad business practices in his cabinet as financial and business advisors. I personally think this would be like me being in financial trouble and then hiring someone to set things straight even though I know the person is in bankruptcy, has been indicted for embezzlement, and still hits up the casinos across the river every night. I must remember that macroeconomics is different from microeconomics, but just looking at this with a slice of common sense, what was he thinking inviting those people into places of power considering how they macroeconomically screwed us? If it were up tome, I would have made sure they got installments on their golden parachute delivered monthly at club fed, not given positions close enough pour poison into the ears of the heads of state.
But what do I know? I am just a financially burdened average citizen. Allowing Corporations the freedom to fund political campaigns disenfranchises the average citizen. Suddenly, not only are the senators being given corporate funds, which the average citizen has no hope of matching, but those corporations can turn around and pressure their workers to vote for their corporately sponsored candidate. It's a move that goes on in non-profit organizations all the time. There's nothing stopping for-profit organizations from doing the same.
My view on corporations is a little skewed, I guess. I tend to think of corporations as a semi-autonomous state. They are not completely bound by the constitution, states, or even national borders. They have a select set of citizens, those that they pay to make their state better. They have unique rules of conduct, dress, relations between one another, power structures, voting systems, and they have allies and enemies. Some companies even have their own security. They have state secrets, a public image, a private training and education system that trains employees to work profitably at that specific company. They have a set amount of benefit and risk to belonging to their sate. Historically, some companies have even made towns and issued "currency" to employees (look up scrip).
People can become patriotic to their corporations and loyal for the same reasons that they become chauvinistic about their country of residence. What is to stop the heads of a corporation for pressuring their workers to vote the way they want by using propaganda? Say a few choice newsletters get circulated about how if "xx" candidate becomes senator, his policies will force the company to cut workers. Chances are, if you work for that company, you are going to vote to keep your job. That's just a simple trick, and people will fall into it because they think that they're keeping their jobs by voting a certain way. It's the same trick that preachers use to influence their congregations. "Oh, don't vote for "xx" because he's for abortion. You should vote for the other guy and we will lead the nation to prosperity." say the preachers, as if one wedge issue makes the measure of a candidate.
The problem is that the heads of the corporations hold the money, carefully disbursed to keep the top tier wealthy and the workers unable to reach that level of wealth. They do not really care for the welfare of their workers. They care about doing the very minimum tolerated benefit to their workers to maximize profit for their administration. People are desperate to have and hold a job and will put up with anything to retain it. Debt tends to do that to people, and by keeping wages low, corporations keep people in debt. This keeps them desperate to retain a job, which defeats the voice of the people in favor of continuing in abject, though paid, servitude It's getting to the point that you might consider the heads of corporations to be like tyrants in every sense of the word. If the tyrants influence our government, than we have lost much of what the American Revolution was about--the struggle for Liberty from Tyranny. This country would not be by the people and for the people, it would be by the wealthy and for the wealthy.
Yes the heads of corporations are citizens of the U.S. as well, but they should not be allowed to rob the people of their government. This is what the supreme court allowed--the wholesale creation of a government influenced and bought by tyrants and fully ignorant of the true needs of the people.
Forgiveness of student loan debt would be one way to help people up to that grand podium again. It would help us out of our burden and allow us to sing proudly. If my years in music training taught me one thing, it is that You cannot be well heard if you do not stand up straight; you cannot stand up straight if you are weighed down beyond your capacity.
What they do not see coming is a lesson in history that people of the twentieth century should not have forgotten: Revolution first comes from the universities, and then radiates to the disenfranchised or underprivileged. This is a pattern seen in almost all of the Eurpoean and many of the Asian uprisings of the past century, even in cases where the revolution seemingly came from the military. To have disenfranchised university students and graduates should be a situation that sends a thrill of fear up the spine of any lawmaker. I will be sorry to see things come to revolution, but it may have to come to that if the excesses of government overshadow the welfare of the people. You might say it will be our civic duty to act in such a case.
I agree with you about corporations--I think they are a) a terrible business model in themselves, and it angers me extremely that they whine about taxes or this or that bill making them lay people off when the real reason they do that is the extreme wage inequality in the corporation (with the people at the top making ten, twenty, thirty times more than those at the bottom, and b) they should not have been granted 'corporate personhood' or any special status in society--if they want to run a biocidal, socially irresponsible, parasitic top-down building, let them do it all on their own. Democratic workers cooperatives are much more efficient, and are able to pay everyone an equal (or nearly equal) living wage with good benefits, because they don't have to subsidize billionaires wearing suits.
It is also true that by burdening people with extreme debt, low wages with no benefits, you make it so that people have to spend their free time working overtime, taking more jobs, stressing about their finances as opposed to engaging in political activity. Obama is a shill for the banksters; it has now been shown that huge amounts of the bailout money given to those institutions was funneled back into congress via lobbying to prevent any good legislation coming out. We desperately need widespread reforms to our economy and the way our democracy works if anything good is ever going to happen in our country.