Pam Brown's Blog l emission - control. net

Education Debt in the Ownership Society

From Alternet:

Will the twin crises of housing and education debt freeze young people out of the American dream?

"Education and housing are inextricably intertwined in both the American imagination and our economy -- yet there has been very little talk about how the student debt crisis and the housing crisis relate to each other in terms of both long-term economic cycles and our changing American identity. As evidenced by the overblown debate over interest rates taking place in Congress, we remain focused on minor details, and have yet to examine the big picture of what these twin crises portend."

What Really is $1 Trillion in Student Loan Debt?

$1 trillion dollars is the equivalent of about $4,000 for every man woman and child in America.

If $1 were equal to 1 second, then $1 trillion would be 31,546 years.

Currently 58% of Americans with a college degree over 25 have some student loan debt.  This is about 37 million Americans.

Two thirds of the class of 2010 borrowed an average of about $25,000 dollars.  Only about 50% of them have a job at all, and about 75% of them returned to live home after college.

That same year, 2010, Americans borrowed more than 100 billion dollars for education.

Whereas 1 in 4 white students owes less than 13K, 1 in 3 black students owes more than 38K.

In 1972 Pell Grants covered 100% of tuition costs.  In 2011 they covered 34%.

41% of the class of 2005 is currently delinquent or in default. 

67 billion dollars in student loans are currently in default.  At any given point only 40% are in repayment.  Only 37% of student loans are paid without delay.

 

Reflections on the Winter Occupation

Occupy’s six-month birthday celebration last Saturday at Zuccotti Park was first spent in celebration: the scene was joyous with friends reuniting after winter hibernation. “Spring training” regimes were conducted. The drum circle was back, and mic checks once again created a collective voice.

But when protestors undertook a spontaneous, albeit brief, reoccupation, they were met with the most violent and unrestrained NYC police force to date. MTA buses were commandeered and over seventy arrests were made. The significance and power of the park was clear once again.

Police violence was immediately challenged with solidarity marches in New York and throughout the country on Sunday. In spite of a winter predicting our demise, Occupy is alive again this spring. Not that we were ever really dead, but since the cops evicted Zuccotti the first time last fall, OWS has been struggling to find a way of staying meaningful without the spectacle of the park. Liberty Park offered a sense of commonality, a point of access, and a feeling of empowerment that has been difficult to replicate.

Continued...

 

The Student Debt System: a Critical Juncture in the Production of Inequality

The following article contains thoughts that I would have liked to have shared on Democracy Now!, but didn't have time for.  Here's the clip of the interview with the article below:

 

 

For most Americans student debt is a simple matter: you got the education, you agreed to pay for it, you can't give back your brain, so suck it up and get to work.  Unfortunately, this sort of logic fundamentally misunderstands the systemic sources by which so much student debt has been incurred, and the long term inequality this debt is creating.  The misunderstanding most Americans have of the student debt cycle is particularly dangerous now that the amount of education debt is about to pass the 1 trillion dollar mark, which amounts to about four thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in this country.  According to the Project on Student Debt, of the class of 2008, 41% are either delinquent or in default.  Many recent reports have already begun to theorize student debt as the next bubble about to burst.  Unfortunately, this bubble has the potential to slowly ooze, causing unrelenting suffering for a generation, and even greater economic disparity for the 99%.

When you look carefully at the student debt crisis, you can see that it has been caused by complex relationships between four distinct types of entities:  governmental agencies, lenders, educational institutions and consumers.

Now is the Time to Refuse Student Debt (Part 1)

Later on today, the #OWS Empowerment & Education Working Group will launch a national campaign that will challenge and draw attention to the growing problem of student debt.

Student loan debt represents the largest portion of all "consumer" debt, and will exceed 1 trillion dollars by the end of the year. Currently, about 67% of students incur debt at the college level. In 2008, approximately 1.4 million seniors graduated with an average of about $26,000 dollars of student loan debt.

In spite of widespread use of loans to finance education, most Americans are unaware of the true nature of these loans, and some of the important issues around our pay-for-diploma education model. The layperson views student loans as a benevolent government program designed to help citizens move into the middle class by attending college. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that student loans have helped to create an education industry that now operates at the expense of our society.

The Ironic Shadow Cast by Steve Jobs' Death

The irony of Steve Jobs dying on the same day as the major Occupy Wall Street protest and march in New York City can’t be overstated, even though it has been completely overlooked by both mainstream and alternative media.  News stories celebrating Steve Jobs as the creator of a technological revolution trumped even local coverage of thousands of OWS supporters marching in the streets.  Of course, Steve Jobs' death and the occupation of Wall Street are unrelated events, yet together they represent the fundamental tension currently at play in American society today:  the crisis in our understanding of who we are as individuals and who we are as part of society. 

The underlying idea behind the OWS protest is that economic inequality, produced by the belief in the individual as able to function separately from the human collective, is misguided, unethical and unsustainable.  The cultural battle being fought at OWS seeks to reprioritize collective needs over individual desires by arguing to end the exploitation of the lower and middle classes by a small elite.  It is this exploitation that has produced economic pain in the form of lack of jobs and loss of economic resources for all but the top 1%.  It is this “failure” of capitalism to produce happiness and security for the majority, as well as its ability to camouflage the relationship between the 99% and the 1%, that calls attention to irreparable problems with the system, itself. 

Why it's Time for New Yorkers to Demand that Mayor Bloomberg to Step Down

I have started a petition demanding that "Mayor" Bloomberg resign from his position as mayor of New York City in hope of drawing attention to and remedying the fascism we are living under here in the Big Apple.  Fascism sounds like a strong word, but it is actually the most accurate description of what has happened in New York City.  We typically view fascism as a kind of nationalistic regime that happens at the point of a gun.  But in reality fascism is something that happens slowly.  Fascism can be described as a tendency toward autocratic control.  In our neoliberal capitalist world, often times guns are unnecessary to achieve control, because money can be used instead. This is what has happened in New York City.

New Yorkers had a law limiting any elected mayor to two terms.  In fact this law was voted on twice in recent elections.  Unfortunately, this law did not apply to Bloomberg.  Why not?  Because he believed he was above it, and had the money to thwart it.  Bloomberg was able to convert his billionaire level economic status to political power by influencing the City Council to change the law.  He argued that his leadership was necessary to restore economic order to the city and nation due to the economic crisis on Wall Street.  Evidently, in the minds of the individual City Council members, the consequences of resisting a change to the term limit law outweighed the consequences of going along with the billionaire Mayor.  But why was the City Council able to change a law voted on by the people of New York City?  The intellectual history of this law is actually quite fascinating.  Since the French Revolution, laws have been carried forth to prevent violent revolution except when absolutely necessary.  The law that allowed the City Council to make this change originated with the need to prevent an arrogant and powerful leader from taking over a government in a violent coup d'tat.  The calculation was that by granting an additional term, the leader might be persuaded to step down at the end of that period, and if not, then violence might be necessary to maintain democracy.

Even though he was able to thwart the two term limit, many New Yorkers were so against Bloomberg's manipulation of the system, that he was forced to spend millions of his billions of dollars in personal wealth to drown out his democratic opponent.  Not surprisingly, some of that money was spent in possible violation of campaign finance laws.  And in the end, he spent so much money that even President Obama did not bother to take a strong stand for his democratic opponent, who most certainly would have won had Bloomberg not been able to use his personal wealth to spend $102 million dollars - about $174 per voter - to win the campaign.  To put things in perspective his opponent spent less than $10 million.  In other words, Bloomberg had no problem using his economic power to change the law to enable himself to run for a third term, and also to use incredible amounts of personal wealth to further subvert the system by drowning out his opponent.

Exposing American Power in a Networked World

If nothing else, the ongoing Wikileaks event has certainly been fascinating.  The recent event highlights the dynamics of power in a networked world, from the inside look at the arrogant manner in which our diplomats perceive their colleagues in other nations, to the exposure of corporate influence on state business such as in the case of Mastercard and Visa in Russia, and Shell in Nigeria, to the manner in which the US government has used its influence to persuade "independent" corporations throughout the world to deny access to services including commerce and web hosting to Wikileaks.  Following are my preliminary thoughts on the essence of the events unfolding around the release of Wikileaks from the perspective of changes we are seeing globally as network society grows.

The Corporate State

In the case of Russia, we can observe the infiltration of the corporate into state functions, where President Obama has intervened on behalf of Mastercard and Visa in an attempt to thwart the creation of a Russian owned credit processing agency.  The potential loss of business for globally dominant credit card processing agencies was not only a matter for the state, but for the president, himself.  In the case of Nigeria, which happens to be the 8th largest supplier of oil internationally, Nigerian government interests (which at least claim to operate on behalf of its people) are shown to have been subverted by the installation of Shell executives at all levels of governance. 

And the reverse operation, using state power to influence corporate actions, is also in full operation.  Senator Lieberman brashly intervened with Amazon such that they have refused to host the Wikileaks website, a Swiss Bank is pursuaded to close the Wikileaks account, apparently for legitimate reasons that may or may not have been exposed without US state intervention, Visa and Mastercard are likely encouraged to refuse service to Wikileaks, while continuing to allow donations to organizations such as the KKK, and PayPal openly admits that they were caused, via a letter they received from the US State Department, to view Wikileaks actions as illegal, and thus, in violation of their service agreement, in spite of the fact that there are still no charges against the organization.

Whatever Happened to Free Speech?

It's hard for me to understand the argument against net neutrality regulation.  It seems so obvious that restrictions on communication impinge on the "free speech" our democracy was based on.  The media corporations that control access to the internet have stated clearly that they intend to control traffic online, allowing some communication to move faster based on how much one is paying.  So many on the Republican side don't seem to appreciate that if money allows one voice to be heard (and causes another to be squelched), there is no freedom of speech in any practical sense in spite of us all having the ability to speak.  This is, of course, the same problem we're dealing with due to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.  The fact that the FCC has not taken strong and bold actions to protect the vast majority of "the people" from corporate domination online is a symbolic of where we are really at in the the United States. 

Chris Hedges says it best quoting Hannah Arendt:

“For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”

How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a Master

The time for compromise has passed on net neutrality

The Feeling of Fascism

I don't watch late night TV, but I saw the clip of David Letterman commenting to Bloomberg that he must be embarrassed to have appeared on the famous Forbes list as the 10th richest man in the world.  But Bloomberg stole the joke by saying that he wasn't embarrassed at all.  This actually stumped Letterman.  I don't know how rich David Letterman is, but I'm betting he's in the top 1%.  But even for someone with that kind of wealth, Bloomberg's unabashed greed was stunning.  Yes, Dave, he really is "laughing all the way to the bank".  What would he have responded if he were asked how he felt about being in a group that made 1.13 TRILLION dollars the same year that 10 million more Americans lost their health coverage and that 1 in 7 were classified as below the poverty line.  I think he probably would have said the same thing - after all his unique qualities as a human being got him there.  This is why he should be a third term mayor of New York, in spite of the fact that a two term limit was voted on by the actual people of this city.  Yet, anytime I use the "f-word" (fascism) people seem stunned - as if that's an extreme statement, when in reality it simply describes exactly what's happening.

I'm reading Paul D'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism and thinking a lot about the way that American society is today.  Has it really changed?  Has it really changed so much that there's cause for alarm?  When work was more plentiful and the stock market going up up up, were things really any different - in reality?  Or did they just feel different, like the way you feel different like after eating too big of a meal. The hunger is gone - replaced by a feeling of fullness that makes it seem like you'll never be hungry again.

It seems to me that many of the ideas about how the world we live in works are not really connected to reality.  I grew up at a time when the ideals of class mobility and meritocracy were hammered home in middle class families.  But there's no denying that those with a leg up, regardless of merit, fared better.  Have things really changed?  Or were these just a convenient beliefs we clung to?  Who was it really convenient for?  Ridding myself of these ideas, is like jumping into a bathtub filled with ice - it's hard, and painful, but the kind of sobering truth that the doctor ordered.  So, the question becomes what to do next?  What to do when we face that American fascism feels just like democracy and capitalism does...that in reality, they are actually the same.