There is no hiding it anymore. All the oligarchs want is a constant surplus of cannon fodder in the form of poor kids desperate to pay off their student loans. Their sadistic depravity knows no bounds! Please, somebody stop these criminals before they wipe out all life on the planet by starting a nuclear war with Russia and/or China.
I see this far too often. Americans want change in their country, but they want someone else to do the work. And if "somebody" can do it in 30 minutes, between the commercials, so much the better.
The criminals won't be stopped until ordinary Americans stop waiting for somebody [else] to do the work. It's that simple.
We love to talk about the Declaration of Independence, especially on the 4th of July, but when was the last time you read it? It clearly says that, if a government isn't meeting the needs of the people, it is not only our right, but our DUTY to get rid of it and replace it with a better one. Not "somebody." WE. The. People.
We still fondly believe that we are "the land of the brave and the home of the free," but we haven't been free for a long time. We aren't free because we aren't brave. And bragging that we are free because our troops are brave (committing atrocities) in unnecessary wars in other countries is only weak propaganda.
When will you be ready to get off your duff in front of the TV and DO SOMETHING besides vote? Or do you think that "somebody" is going to be a flock of archangels from on high, so you won't get your hands dirty?
I'm extremely tired of this attitude.
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary (it's not what you think) and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by the late Dr Gene Sharp. You can buy a copy on eBay.
Of fucking course my rep signed that godawful letter. Of COURSE he did. He didn’t have a single fucking word to say as troops were being thrown out of the military left and right for refusing the poison shot but now all of a sudden he’s concerned about retention and attrition. What a shocker!
For those who wonder why European governments are intentionally destroying their own economies by voluntarily cutting off their access to Russian energy supplies just prior to winter, and by restricting fertilizers to their farmers and forcing farmers into bankruptcy, imagine how much easier it will be to recruit kids for NATO militaries when potential teenage applicants are freezing in their homes and food is in short supply.
The NATO allies are merely adopting U.S. recruiting tactics: To get the poor kids into your military, you must first make kids poor.
I think its more a direct assault on those populations rather than behavior modification. they are not trying to drive enlistment, they are simply trying to eliminate those military aged people from the population through famine and freezing among many other efforts. Replace them with foreign immigrants and there is no need to modify western behavior.
University? What madness is this? All of the propaganda starts in schools. Right now the "Are you a boy or a girl?" crowd has the agenda?" Wrong is good, lies are truth and truth are lies.
If they didn't screw around so much in grade school with propaganda, left or right, kids would have an education by the time they were 20.
But then again, what are they teaching?
How to exploit resources and people are really the only things taught in school and the results are pollution and/ or war.
The complexity of the systems we have setup is mind-boggling.
In essence we need the poor to become educated but don't because the educated will exploit resources after being taught by lizard brained professors to destroy the planet.
The student loan buy back isn't about citizens, it is about banks getting their money. Banks have overextended their credit. The current recession and inflation will soon blow up all money. And banks are out of value and the buyback program is a facade of injecting valueless currency into an economy to win a midterm. Everything in the USA is on credit. Europe is worse. This facade of credit has destroyed the west.
War is looming. They need to kill us off before we catch them.
Let me explain sectoral balances to you: in one way, the economy can be looked at through the lens of the three sectors, the public sector, the private sector, and the third sector, the balance of trade between the US and the rest of the world. Since the third sector is somewhat settled (and please don't change the subject by trying to argue about that), we generally consider the balance between the public sector and the private sector.
The public sector is defined as the activity of the US government. The private sector is the ordinary people and the businesses they own or work for.
One major difference between them is that the government is the currency CREATOR. (US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8) The private sector consists of currency USERS.
Since the government creates its own currency, it can never "go broke" or fail to meet any of its own debts in its own currency. We, however, are not in that halcyon position. We know that we have to pay back any debt we occur.
This is why it's a mistake to talk about the government's "budget." We are automatically and emotionally thrown into a comparison with our own household budget, but they aren't remotely similar.
Finally, the "deficit" is the sum of the amount of money the government spends into the economy minus the taxes it receives. Of course the government spends more than it gets back! (Consider what our situation would be if we owed more than the government created.) Please leave aside "the debt" for a moment. The deficit and the debt are not synonymous.
Comparing the balance of the two sectors, then, if the government has a deficit, the people don't have to borrow as much. Stephanie Kelton addresses this in her book, The Deficit Myth. When a bunch of balance-the-budget neoliberals get in power, though, and want to lower the deficit, the amount that ordinary people will have to borrow RISES.
High deficit = lower peonage debt
Low deficit = high peonage debt
And the government can never go broke for any debt it incurs in its own currency.
Moral of the story: it's better for you & me to have the government have a larger deficit than for us to go into debt. They can afford it and we can't.
All branches of the U.S. military have been complaining bitterly that they can't make recruiting goals.
Apparently the prospect of enemies that can actually shoot back, along with a fat and neurotic populace that can't meet basic requirements, is causing concern.
Scratching a neurosis can be a selling point for recruiters: Murder, rape, torture, pederasty all has a long tradition in overseas military actions, and most of them occur frequently even in permanent bases located in pet poodle countries like Japan, England, etc.
The State Department equally sells its immunity package as an attraction to recruits from the Ivey League. Everywhere I went around the world the American and UK diplomatic core were infamous for their abuse. I happened to be living in Hong Kong when a US Consulate employee threw his Hong Kong girlfriend off his 21st story balcony. The British colonial government quashed reporting on the event locally, and of course there was no coverage state side.
That's the tragedy of it all - all that talent wasted on the art of killing other human beings, while the earth is literally beginning to burn up as its ecosystem collapses.
Think about it, the traditional totalitarian roadmap: spend the majority of your money on the military, leave teachers to fend for themselves and pay for classroom supplies, fuck over your health care system - brutalize your workers if they attempt to have fair working conditions for themselves and decent pay - make sure your justice system serves only the rich, marginalize women by taking away their rights and paying them less - militarize your police more - set up an internal govt institution that monitors your own citizens daily and silently invades their privacy without half of them even knowing - remove habeas corpus so you can disappear any of your citizens at the drop of a hat.
It all goes under the rubric of democracy, freedom, superiority - and godliness. It is proto-fascism quickly hardening into fascism. The West is openly supporting fascism in Ukraine, and Europeans are being urged to go along at their own extreme expense. We can't seem to separate fantasy from reality. And they keep saying socialism is unrealistic and subject to the "good intentions" fallacy: it must go wrong because it is right. Better to choose wrong and abandon all illusions??
"the established fact that a majority of US military recruits come from neighborhoods with below median income levels and that those neighborhoods are targeted for recruitment because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility. "
Case in point: take a loom at on the ground conditions in Ashtabula, Ohio (sorry Mr. Dylan!)
I did an episode called Reinventing Education that gives a LOT of details on the predatory student loan program. Much of my research came from The Student Loan Scam by Alan Michael Collinge. When you know the facts and extent of the corruption, it's hard to believe this has been normalized by every HS counselor. And yet, I talk about why blanket student loan forgiveness is logistically untenable and Biden's is particularly badly designed. However, under the system changes I propose in my book and Substack, those loans could be turned towards revitalizing the community: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/reinventing-education.
Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.
I didn't do any research, per se on Student Loans when I was young.
1. Because I never went to University or even matriculated full courses in community college.
I graduated high school in 1969 and proceeded to protest the Vietnam War at American Legion Posts, VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and public areas such as Court house squares.
2. Because I had also become a singer in classic rock groups as an income.
BUT....I did get drafted and had to report for a physical at the Syracuse NY military service facility.
I failed the physical but passed the written. I got out.
I did Not become an oligarchic soldier.
My point here is simple.
The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973.
THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder.
And THIS is the reason the US Empire believes that education now is less important than dying for the cause of protecting Corporate profits in EVERY country outside of the US soil that the US Empire has military bases.
The last number I knew of those bases was between 600 and 800.
This is how the Corporatocracy works and will continue to work, as long as working American taxpayers are forced to pay for a military full spectrum dominance in this Global Industrial Complex.
We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires.
The Billionaires and the Banks, with their "Modern Money Mechanics" financial policy document, control the entire planet.
That control is all encompassing and they MUST have military dominance to protect their global profits.
No one wants a draft again. No one (I know) wants 'endless war'.
No one wants to be subjected to poverty, illness and starvation because they served in a military whose Govt will NOT take care of them.
But that's what we're faced with, as pawns in a system that will inevitably chew us up and spit us out into cemeteries and/or urns of ashes throughout this "land of the free".
I'm a ~boomer~ that does not begrudge ANY student whatever it costs to become educated.
Just do me a favor:
Endeavor to learn how to dismantle this Monetary system and search for a way to technologically make non-fossil fuel energy (zero-point energy), useful and FREE to every human on the planet.
"The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973. THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder."
The draft was leaking, (ex: sock puppet Bush Jr. and his puppeteer Dick-head Chenny) but to a degree it forced the middle class to have stake in any war. The draft being done away with created a supply of cannon fodder, to remove the revulsion to body bags returning home, and as an added advantage it removed a large mass of educated, articulate white young men who might write and speak about the horror and who might more successfully work within the system to restrict the MIC. Instead, those young men found their career often dependent on the MIC backend instead.
Now the people who matter can watch the news with no fear, and even a perverse pleasure. It's why war porn sells so well on youtube, it's the thrill of Rome's colosseum for the modern age.
You are speaking my language, Rick, my fellow boomer. That's the exact topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which talks about those 800+ military bases and how we became pawns of the monetary system and how to get out of it. Change who our labor serves, to being the community rather than the bankers, and I believe the rest will come. We already have solutions and plenty of creativity but a system that actively suppresses whatever interferes with profits.
For me, it's not a matter of begrudging students education (and we should be clear that education, all you can eat, is already freely available in books and on the internet). What they pay an arm and a leg for is a degree, authorized by the powers-that-be, which has a curriculum that serves the corporatocracy.
If you're paying for teachers and buildings and administration, that's not free, it's taxpayer subsidized. So then you need to decide how much education anyone deserves, who's entitled to teach, what subjects you're willing to pay for, and who's qualified to take them. It leads to centralized control and a point where that student has to stop learning in order to work and pay for other people to learn.
In my system, I say that cheap is better than free because it puts the person in control of what they want to learn and from whom. It makes learning (with travel!) lifelong and subsidizes it equally for all people throughout their lifetimes, rather than concentrating it in four intensive years. Check it out if interested, and here's my book and an episode on building a new economic model:
This is once again right on the money! The truth even as disgusting as it is is better then the guise of morality this scum puts forth to continually destroy people and planet. What is just as disgusting is the fact that these people continue to be re-elected every time by the same old bullshit story "We gave you some crumbs and the other party took them away so next time we screw you over will be better"!
You continue to amaze me. Your writing is a joy to read and you so often also rip open topics which run to the "heart of the matter". The poverty draft indeed. And, blow me down, they've admitted it!
...constant wars! , constant crimes!, constant slavery !(obedient populus!), same effect through History mental lack of brain development = repetitiveness!....as I said before, ''humans'' have too many faulty chromosomes !....
In pre-capitalist societies (where there were often warrior classes), military service was typically one of the ways to status and acceptance. So this is an ancient thing still going on.
The issue is that we expect that things have gotten better when they haven't. And that may be enough because I too find this disgusting, but I can't help feeling that the general problem is that liberalism's rhetoric has outpaced reality, that we are as barbaric and feudal as ever.
I wholeheartedly agree with your running themes and see you as one of the sane, good people, but just wanted to add this thought.
There is no hiding it anymore. All the oligarchs want is a constant surplus of cannon fodder in the form of poor kids desperate to pay off their student loans. Their sadistic depravity knows no bounds! Please, somebody stop these criminals before they wipe out all life on the planet by starting a nuclear war with Russia and/or China.
Please, "somebody"??
I see this far too often. Americans want change in their country, but they want someone else to do the work. And if "somebody" can do it in 30 minutes, between the commercials, so much the better.
The criminals won't be stopped until ordinary Americans stop waiting for somebody [else] to do the work. It's that simple.
We love to talk about the Declaration of Independence, especially on the 4th of July, but when was the last time you read it? It clearly says that, if a government isn't meeting the needs of the people, it is not only our right, but our DUTY to get rid of it and replace it with a better one. Not "somebody." WE. The. People.
We still fondly believe that we are "the land of the brave and the home of the free," but we haven't been free for a long time. We aren't free because we aren't brave. And bragging that we are free because our troops are brave (committing atrocities) in unnecessary wars in other countries is only weak propaganda.
When will you be ready to get off your duff in front of the TV and DO SOMETHING besides vote? Or do you think that "somebody" is going to be a flock of archangels from on high, so you won't get your hands dirty?
I'm extremely tired of this attitude.
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary (it's not what you think) and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by the late Dr Gene Sharp. You can buy a copy on eBay.
Better yet, host a viewing party in your home.
Thanks for the recommendations.
You're welcome. I always hope that someone, like you, will take them up and spread the news of what they say.
Of fucking course my rep signed that godawful letter. Of COURSE he did. He didn’t have a single fucking word to say as troops were being thrown out of the military left and right for refusing the poison shot but now all of a sudden he’s concerned about retention and attrition. What a shocker!
You saved me some writing.
I'm relieved that mine didn't sign it.
For those who wonder why European governments are intentionally destroying their own economies by voluntarily cutting off their access to Russian energy supplies just prior to winter, and by restricting fertilizers to their farmers and forcing farmers into bankruptcy, imagine how much easier it will be to recruit kids for NATO militaries when potential teenage applicants are freezing in their homes and food is in short supply.
The NATO allies are merely adopting U.S. recruiting tactics: To get the poor kids into your military, you must first make kids poor.
I think its more a direct assault on those populations rather than behavior modification. they are not trying to drive enlistment, they are simply trying to eliminate those military aged people from the population through famine and freezing among many other efforts. Replace them with foreign immigrants and there is no need to modify western behavior.
and angry, the race baiting is important too.
@JackSirius BAM!
University? What madness is this? All of the propaganda starts in schools. Right now the "Are you a boy or a girl?" crowd has the agenda?" Wrong is good, lies are truth and truth are lies.
If they didn't screw around so much in grade school with propaganda, left or right, kids would have an education by the time they were 20.
But then again, what are they teaching?
How to exploit resources and people are really the only things taught in school and the results are pollution and/ or war.
The complexity of the systems we have setup is mind-boggling.
In essence we need the poor to become educated but don't because the educated will exploit resources after being taught by lizard brained professors to destroy the planet.
The student loan buy back isn't about citizens, it is about banks getting their money. Banks have overextended their credit. The current recession and inflation will soon blow up all money. And banks are out of value and the buyback program is a facade of injecting valueless currency into an economy to win a midterm. Everything in the USA is on credit. Europe is worse. This facade of credit has destroyed the west.
War is looming. They need to kill us off before we catch them.
Where will you run, should be your concern.
"But then again, what are they teaching?"
How to answer multiple choice tests with a passing grade.
We got bins, lots of bins, now start hacking yourself up and throwing different parts of
you into the bins for sorting.
Orwellian Common Core, to divide a nation against itself even further.
Let me explain sectoral balances to you: in one way, the economy can be looked at through the lens of the three sectors, the public sector, the private sector, and the third sector, the balance of trade between the US and the rest of the world. Since the third sector is somewhat settled (and please don't change the subject by trying to argue about that), we generally consider the balance between the public sector and the private sector.
The public sector is defined as the activity of the US government. The private sector is the ordinary people and the businesses they own or work for.
One major difference between them is that the government is the currency CREATOR. (US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8) The private sector consists of currency USERS.
Since the government creates its own currency, it can never "go broke" or fail to meet any of its own debts in its own currency. We, however, are not in that halcyon position. We know that we have to pay back any debt we occur.
This is why it's a mistake to talk about the government's "budget." We are automatically and emotionally thrown into a comparison with our own household budget, but they aren't remotely similar.
Finally, the "deficit" is the sum of the amount of money the government spends into the economy minus the taxes it receives. Of course the government spends more than it gets back! (Consider what our situation would be if we owed more than the government created.) Please leave aside "the debt" for a moment. The deficit and the debt are not synonymous.
Comparing the balance of the two sectors, then, if the government has a deficit, the people don't have to borrow as much. Stephanie Kelton addresses this in her book, The Deficit Myth. When a bunch of balance-the-budget neoliberals get in power, though, and want to lower the deficit, the amount that ordinary people will have to borrow RISES.
High deficit = lower peonage debt
Low deficit = high peonage debt
And the government can never go broke for any debt it incurs in its own currency.
Moral of the story: it's better for you & me to have the government have a larger deficit than for us to go into debt. They can afford it and we can't.
US Military to Hollywood- " Crank up the war propaganda films"
All branches of the U.S. military have been complaining bitterly that they can't make recruiting goals.
Apparently the prospect of enemies that can actually shoot back, along with a fat and neurotic populace that can't meet basic requirements, is causing concern.
Scratching a neurosis can be a selling point for recruiters: Murder, rape, torture, pederasty all has a long tradition in overseas military actions, and most of them occur frequently even in permanent bases located in pet poodle countries like Japan, England, etc.
The State Department equally sells its immunity package as an attraction to recruits from the Ivey League. Everywhere I went around the world the American and UK diplomatic core were infamous for their abuse. I happened to be living in Hong Kong when a US Consulate employee threw his Hong Kong girlfriend off his 21st story balcony. The British colonial government quashed reporting on the event locally, and of course there was no coverage state side.
hmmm....the military is seeking obedient drones who will unthinkingly carry out orders.
State is looking for cynics and sociopaths.
Pretty soon they'll be explicit about these perks too.
"...our nation’s military and their ability to recruit and retain top talent." - yeah, the top talent to kill in faraway lands.
That's the tragedy of it all - all that talent wasted on the art of killing other human beings, while the earth is literally beginning to burn up as its ecosystem collapses.
They just want to speed it up.
How did I end up in this upside down reality? I mean, of all the quantum universes - I'm in this one!
US policy is driven by coercion and the desperation of people in a failed state, and perhaps the failure is deliberate insofar as it affects the 90%.
Think about it, the traditional totalitarian roadmap: spend the majority of your money on the military, leave teachers to fend for themselves and pay for classroom supplies, fuck over your health care system - brutalize your workers if they attempt to have fair working conditions for themselves and decent pay - make sure your justice system serves only the rich, marginalize women by taking away their rights and paying them less - militarize your police more - set up an internal govt institution that monitors your own citizens daily and silently invades their privacy without half of them even knowing - remove habeas corpus so you can disappear any of your citizens at the drop of a hat.
It all goes under the rubric of democracy, freedom, superiority - and godliness. It is proto-fascism quickly hardening into fascism. The West is openly supporting fascism in Ukraine, and Europeans are being urged to go along at their own extreme expense. We can't seem to separate fantasy from reality. And they keep saying socialism is unrealistic and subject to the "good intentions" fallacy: it must go wrong because it is right. Better to choose wrong and abandon all illusions??
Gotta keep the population desperate for this "experiment in democracy" to work!
Thanks as always, Caitlin!!!
"the established fact that a majority of US military recruits come from neighborhoods with below median income levels and that those neighborhoods are targeted for recruitment because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility. "
Case in point: take a loom at on the ground conditions in Ashtabula, Ohio (sorry Mr. Dylan!)
http://www.wolfenotes.com/2022/02/infrastructure-scenes-from-northeast-ohio-that-biden-and-media-didnt-depict/
I did an episode called Reinventing Education that gives a LOT of details on the predatory student loan program. Much of my research came from The Student Loan Scam by Alan Michael Collinge. When you know the facts and extent of the corruption, it's hard to believe this has been normalized by every HS counselor. And yet, I talk about why blanket student loan forgiveness is logistically untenable and Biden's is particularly badly designed. However, under the system changes I propose in my book and Substack, those loans could be turned towards revitalizing the community: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/reinventing-education.
Free education anyone?
I got my free education back in Eastern Europe, where we also had free healthcare...
What MONSTERS those commies were!
I do remember those indeed. Scary fuckers.
Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.
I didn't do any research, per se on Student Loans when I was young.
1. Because I never went to University or even matriculated full courses in community college.
I graduated high school in 1969 and proceeded to protest the Vietnam War at American Legion Posts, VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and public areas such as Court house squares.
2. Because I had also become a singer in classic rock groups as an income.
BUT....I did get drafted and had to report for a physical at the Syracuse NY military service facility.
I failed the physical but passed the written. I got out.
I did Not become an oligarchic soldier.
My point here is simple.
The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973.
THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder.
And THIS is the reason the US Empire believes that education now is less important than dying for the cause of protecting Corporate profits in EVERY country outside of the US soil that the US Empire has military bases.
The last number I knew of those bases was between 600 and 800.
This is how the Corporatocracy works and will continue to work, as long as working American taxpayers are forced to pay for a military full spectrum dominance in this Global Industrial Complex.
We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires.
The Billionaires and the Banks, with their "Modern Money Mechanics" financial policy document, control the entire planet.
That control is all encompassing and they MUST have military dominance to protect their global profits.
No one wants a draft again. No one (I know) wants 'endless war'.
No one wants to be subjected to poverty, illness and starvation because they served in a military whose Govt will NOT take care of them.
But that's what we're faced with, as pawns in a system that will inevitably chew us up and spit us out into cemeteries and/or urns of ashes throughout this "land of the free".
I'm a ~boomer~ that does not begrudge ANY student whatever it costs to become educated.
Just do me a favor:
Endeavor to learn how to dismantle this Monetary system and search for a way to technologically make non-fossil fuel energy (zero-point energy), useful and FREE to every human on the planet.
Please.
"We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires. "
... and all based on NOTHING - funny money. In some sense, this is poetic - a reflection of quantum mechanics in finance :P...
"The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973. THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder."
The draft was leaking, (ex: sock puppet Bush Jr. and his puppeteer Dick-head Chenny) but to a degree it forced the middle class to have stake in any war. The draft being done away with created a supply of cannon fodder, to remove the revulsion to body bags returning home, and as an added advantage it removed a large mass of educated, articulate white young men who might write and speak about the horror and who might more successfully work within the system to restrict the MIC. Instead, those young men found their career often dependent on the MIC backend instead.
Now the people who matter can watch the news with no fear, and even a perverse pleasure. It's why war porn sells so well on youtube, it's the thrill of Rome's colosseum for the modern age.
You are speaking my language, Rick, my fellow boomer. That's the exact topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which talks about those 800+ military bases and how we became pawns of the monetary system and how to get out of it. Change who our labor serves, to being the community rather than the bankers, and I believe the rest will come. We already have solutions and plenty of creativity but a system that actively suppresses whatever interferes with profits.
For me, it's not a matter of begrudging students education (and we should be clear that education, all you can eat, is already freely available in books and on the internet). What they pay an arm and a leg for is a degree, authorized by the powers-that-be, which has a curriculum that serves the corporatocracy.
If you're paying for teachers and buildings and administration, that's not free, it's taxpayer subsidized. So then you need to decide how much education anyone deserves, who's entitled to teach, what subjects you're willing to pay for, and who's qualified to take them. It leads to centralized control and a point where that student has to stop learning in order to work and pay for other people to learn.
In my system, I say that cheap is better than free because it puts the person in control of what they want to learn and from whom. It makes learning (with travel!) lifelong and subsidizes it equally for all people throughout their lifetimes, rather than concentrating it in four intensive years. Check it out if interested, and here's my book and an episode on building a new economic model:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607/
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/build-a-new-model
Thank you for your reply and your offer.
☮️ 💜 ☯️ ♾️
Rick..
This is once again right on the money! The truth even as disgusting as it is is better then the guise of morality this scum puts forth to continually destroy people and planet. What is just as disgusting is the fact that these people continue to be re-elected every time by the same old bullshit story "We gave you some crumbs and the other party took them away so next time we screw you over will be better"!
Dear Caitlin,
You continue to amaze me. Your writing is a joy to read and you so often also rip open topics which run to the "heart of the matter". The poverty draft indeed. And, blow me down, they've admitted it!
Regards,
...constant wars! , constant crimes!, constant slavery !(obedient populus!), same effect through History mental lack of brain development = repetitiveness!....as I said before, ''humans'' have too many faulty chromosomes !....
Hahaha. I don't know how best to direct the Schadenfreude.
In pre-capitalist societies (where there were often warrior classes), military service was typically one of the ways to status and acceptance. So this is an ancient thing still going on.
The issue is that we expect that things have gotten better when they haven't. And that may be enough because I too find this disgusting, but I can't help feeling that the general problem is that liberalism's rhetoric has outpaced reality, that we are as barbaric and feudal as ever.
I wholeheartedly agree with your running themes and see you as one of the sane, good people, but just wanted to add this thought.