There are a number of new books out, about policing, and I've heard them
discussed in detail on several podcasts. One of the facts that shocks me over
and over again, even though I've read it in article after article, and now
heard about it in these discussions on policing, is that there are police
officers, (security officers", in every school attended by poor children of
color, and that when children misbehave, children as young as five or six years
of age, they may be handcuffed and brought to a police station. I suppose that
if I'd gone to sleep in 1981 and awakened in 2001 and discovered that I needed
to stand on line to be searched before getting on an airplane, that there were
security checks in the lobbies of all the large buildings in Manhattan, that
cameras were spying on the populace in the streets and on the roads, if it
hadn't happened little by little and if I hadn't seen the mass hysteria after
9/11, I'd be shocked about all these public searches. But remember, I attended
what was supposed to be one of the toughest high schools in New York City in
the early 1950's. There were reportedly, knife fights on the stairwells. The
majority of students were poor black and Hispanic youngsters. But there were no
police in my school, no handcuffs or arrests. There were teachers guarding the
hallways, asking to see our passes if we were not in class. The toughest boys
in the school were given the job of monitoring the staircases, and just like in
Blackboard Jungle, we had up and down staircases, and woe be to the student
discovered going up on a down staircase. But no police. Back in the mid 60's,
someone wrote this shocking report which said that our education reinforced our
social class system. I heard it on the radio, I believe on a mainstream
station. And people were shocked because they thought that education was a
mechanism for encouraging equality, even all those people who moved from
Levittown to Great Neck thought so. And you know why they made that move? The
schools in Great Neck were reputed to be, "better", which meant, smaller
classes, more college prep courses, more students attending college.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2017 10:33 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Great College Loan Swindle
Public Education, we point to it with pride. Our nation, we say, is great
because of our great public education. Sorry, it's another of those Great
American Myths. Like, "...Freedom and Justice for All".
Yes, because of our public education, we do have a high literacy rate.
But has it changed in the past ten years?
According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of
Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S.
can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the
U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates
can't read.
The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn't Changed In 10 Years | (HuffPost).
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html
Besides failing to end literacy, as promised, we might want to wonder just what
is being "taught" our children. Certainly we are not teaching them how to get
along with one another. There are no classes in self respect, or in respect
for the differences of others. Yet this lack of teaching seems to have enabled
some growing violence and hatred for those "different" than us. So Content
should be a major concern.
And what about this "Public" part of public education? A casual glance will
tell anyone that the poorer you are, the less public education you have access
to. The wealthy take a pass on the public education offered, even though the
schools for the privileged are modern, well staffed facilities. They much
prefer to turn to expensive private schools, or individual tutoring.
In fact, quality of education is a major piece in the building of the American
Caste System.
Imagine if it were some other government with whom we were not getting along
with...which could include just about any other nation today.
We learn that this government is using public schools to propagandize their
young. We learn that they are allowing their infrastructure to crumble in
order to fatten the coffers of their Industrial/Military Complex. We are shown
how they place their young into personal debt, through school loans, that they
can never buy their way out of. We notice the rise in homeless families. We
notice that foreclosures seem to only occur among the middle and lower classes,
not among the Ruling Class. We are told that this nation's government has
declared the Press to be the Enemy of the People. We learn of large numbers of
voters being purged from voters roles, mostly people of Color. We are struck
by the fact that working class citizens cannot afford to use the Justice
System. The courts and the lawyers are far too costly.
And among other indications of an emerging Absolute Dictatorship, we see this
nation "select" as their leader a man whose single greatest ability is to scam
the people and to turn one group against another, while declaring that he and
he alone can lead them back to their former greatness!
If we saw all of that spread out before us, my bet is that we'd all be
demanding that we cut off all relations with such an oppressive, cruel
government.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/4/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This whole college loan thing is just unbelievable to me. It's one of
these incredible changes that I can't get my head around. I attended
Queens College, which was a top New York City college from 1955 to
1959 and paid
$10 a semester registration fee. Suddenly, in the 1970's, people were
paying several hundred dollars tuition each semester. When I went to
college, I don't remember seeing one black student in any of my
classes. I had one black professor, a sociology professor. In the 70's
when the cost went up, theoretically, they started something called
"open enrollment" in the city colleges, which meant that students
didn't have to take an entrance exam or have a certain grade point
average to get in like they did in the 1950's.
They also began opening community colleges. But they were charging
fees which eliminated certain kinds of students.
Miriam.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Abby ;
Vincent
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2017 8:06 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Great College Loan Swindle
When my son was in college, he borrowed part of his Colorado U.
tuition from a government sponsored revolving loan program. It wasn't
long before the banksters took over these loans, making it harder to
make payments when times are hard and increasing the cost
dramatically. Think of how robust
our economy would be if unemployment were low and the loan payments
could
go toward buying a home and starting a family.
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam ;
Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2017 1:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Great College Loan Swindle
Students on a college campus. (photo: Calvin College)
The Great College Loan Swindle
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
04 November 17
How universities, banks and the government turned student debt into
America's next financial black hole
On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old
schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted '92 Toyota Tercel
in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this
spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to end his
life.
Beaten down after more than a decade of struggle with student debt,
after years of taking false doors and slipping into various puddles of
bureaucratic quicksand, he was giving up the fight. "This is it, I'm done,"
he remembers thinking. "I sat there and just sort of felt like I'm
going to take my life. I'm going to find a way to park this car in the
garage, with it running or whatever."
Nailor's problems began at 19 years old, when he borrowed for tuition
so that he could pursue a bachelor's degree at the University of
Southern Maine. He graduated summa cum laude four years later and
immediately got a job in his field, as an English teacher.
But he graduated with $35,000 in debt, a big hill to climb on a
part-time teacher's $18,000 salary. He struggled with payments, and he
and his wife then consolidated their student debt, which soon totaled more
than $50,000.
They declared bankruptcy and defaulted on the loans. From there he
found himself in a loan "rehabilitation" program that added to his
overall balance. "That's when the noose began to tighten," he says.
The collectors called day and night, at work and at home. "In the
middle of class too, while I was teaching," he says. He ended up in
another rehabilitation program that put him on a road toward an
essentially endless cycle of rising payments. Today, he pays $471 a
month toward "rehabilitation," and, like countless other borrowers, he
pays nothing at all toward his real debt, which he now calculates
would cost more than
$100,000 to extinguish. "Not one dollar of it goes to principal," says
Nailor. "I will never be able to pay it off. My only hope to escape
from this crushing debt is to die."
After repeated phone calls with lending agencies about his ever-rising
interest payments, Nailor now believes things will only get worse with
time.
"At this rate, I may easily break $1 million in debt before I retire
from teaching," he says.
Nailor had more than once reached the stage in his thoughts where he
was thinking about how to physically pull off his suicide. "I'd been
there before, that just was the worst of it," he says. "It scared me, bad."
He had a young son and a younger daughter, but Nailor had been so
broken by the experience of financial failure that he managed to
convince himself they would be better off without him. What saved him
is that he called his wife to say goodbye. "I don't know why I called
my wife. I'm glad I did," he says. "I just wanted her or someone to
tell me to pick it up, keep fighting, it's going to be all right. And
she did."
From that moment, Nailor managed to focus on his family. Still, the
core problem - the spiraling debt that has taken over his life, as it
has for millions of other Americans - remains.
Horror stories about student debt are nothing new. But this school
year marks a considerable worsening of a tale that ought to have been
a national emergency years ago. The government in charge of regulating
this mess is now filled with predatory monsters who have extensive
ties to the exploitative for-profit education industry - from Donald
Trump himself to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who sets much of the
federal loan policy, to Julian Schmoke, onetime dean of the infamous
DeVry University, whom Trump appointed to police fraud in education.
Americans don't understand the student-loan crisis because they've
been trained to view the issue in terms of a series of separate,
unrelated problems. They will read in one place that as of the summer
of 2017, a record 8.5 million Americans are in default on their
student debt, with about $1.3 trillion in loans still outstanding.
In another place, voters will read that the cost of higher education
is skyrocketing, soaring in a seemingly market-defying arc that for
nearly a decade now has run almost double the rate of inflation.
Tuition for a halfway decent school now frequently surpasses $50,000 a
year. How, the average newsreader wonders, can any child not born in a
yacht afford to go to school these days?
In a third place, that same reader will see some heartless monster,
usually a Republican, threatening to cut federal student lending. The
current bogeyman is Trump, who is threatening to slash the Pell Grant
program by
$3.9 billion, which would seem to put higher education even further
out of reach for poor and middle-income families. This too seems
appalling, and triggers a different kind of response, encouraging
progressive voters to lobby for increased availability for educational
lending.
But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath:
The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact, since the
mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is
probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.
It's a multiparty affair, what shakedown artists call a "big store scheme,"
like in the movie The Sting: a complex deception requiring a big cast
to string the mark along every step of the way. In higher education,
every party you meet, from the moment you first set foot on campus, is
in on the game.
America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy
of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our economic pie
- sectors like health care, military production, banking, even
commercial and residential real estate - have become crude
income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by
subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting from
gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as
assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams - that's the last thing
America makes with any level of consistent competence. In that light,
Trump, among other things, the former head of a schlock diploma mill
called Trump University, is a perfect president for these times. He's
the scammer-in-chief in the Great American Ripoff Age, a time in which
fleecing students is one of our signature achievements.
It starts with the sales pitch colleges make to kids. The thrust of it
is usually that people who go to college make lots more money than the
unfortunate dunces who don't. "A bachelor's degree is worth $2.8
million on average over a lifetime" is how Georgetown University put
it. The Census Bureau tells us similarly that a master's degree is
worth on average about
$1.3 million more than a high school diploma.
But these stats say more about the increasing uselessness of a high
school degree than they do about the value of a college diploma.
Moreover, since virtually everyone at the very highest strata of
society has a college degree, the stats are skewed by a handful of
financial titans. A college degree has become a minimal status marker
as much as anything else. "I'm sure people who take polo lessons or
sailing lessons earn a lot more on average too," says Alan Collinge of
Student Loan Justice, which advocates for debt forgiveness and other
reforms. "Does that mean you should send your kids to sailing school?"
But the pitch works on everyone these days, especially since good jobs
for Trump's beloved "poorly educated" are scarce to nonexistent. Going
to college doesn't guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data
show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly shallow
pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There's a lot of
stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.
It's a vicious cycle. Since everyone feels obligated to go to college,
most everyone who can go, does, creating a glut of graduates. And as
that glut of degree recipients grows, the squeeze on the un-degreed
grows tighter, increasing further that original negative incentive:
Don't go to college, and you'll be standing on soup lines by age 25.
With that inducement in place, colleges can charge almost any amount,
and kids will pay - so long as they can get the money. And here we run
into problem number two: It's too easy to find that money.
Parents, not wanting their kids to fall behind, will pay every dollar
they have. But if they don't have the cash, there is a virtually
unlimited amount of credit available to young people. Proposed cuts to
Pell Grants aside, the landscape is filled with public and private
lending, and students gobble it up. Kids who walk into financial-aid
offices are often not told what signing their names on the various aid
forms will mean down the line. A lot of kids don't even understand the
concept of interest or amortization tables - they think if they're
borrowing $8,000, they're paying back $8,000.
Nailor certainly was unaware of what he was getting into when he was
19. "I had no idea [about interest]," he says. "I just remember
thinking, 'I don't have to worry about it right now. I want to go to
school.' " He pauses in disgust. "It's unsettling to remember how it
was like, 'Here, just sign this and you're all set.' I wish I could
take the time machine back and slap myself in the face."
The average amount of debt for a student leaving school is
skyrocketing even faster than the rate of tuition increase. In 2016,
for instance, the average amount of debt for an exiting college
graduate was a staggering $37,172.
That's a rise of six percent over just the previous year. With the
average undergraduate interest rate at about 3.7 percent, the interest
alone costs around $115 per month, meaning anyone who can't afford to
pay into the principal faces the prospect of $69,000 in payments over 50
years.
So here's the con so far. You must go to college because you're
screwed if you don't. Costs are outrageously high, but you pay them
because you have to, and because the system makes it easy to borrow
massive amounts of money.
The third part of the con is the worst: You can't get out of the debt.
Since
government lenders in particular have virtually unlimited power to
collect on student debt - preying on everything from salary to
income-tax returns - even running is not an option. And since most
young people find themselves unable to make their full payments early
on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only,
never touching the principal. Our billionaire president can declare
bankruptcy four times, but students are the one class of citizen that may not
do it even once.
October 2017 was supposed to represent the first glimmer of light at
the end of this tunnel. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the
Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, one of the few avenues for
wiping out student debt. The idea, launched by George W. Bush, was
pretty simple: Students could pledge to work 10 years for the
government or a nonprofit and have their debt forgiven. In order to
qualify, borrowers had to make payments for
10 years using a complex formula. This month, then, was to start the
first mass wipeouts of debt in the history of American student
lending. But more than half of the 700,000 enrollees have already been
expunged from the program for, among other things, failing to certify
their incomes on time, one of many bureaucratic tricks employed to limit
forgiveness eligibility.
To date, fewer than 500 participants are scheduled to receive loan
forgiveness in this first round.
Moreover, Trump has called for the program's elimination by 2018,
meaning that any relief that begins this month is likely only
temporary. The only thing that is guaranteed to remain real for the
immediate future are the massive profits being generated on the backs
of young people, who before long become old people who, all too often,
remain ensnared until their last days in one of the country's most
brilliant and devious moneymaking schemes.
Everybody wins in this madness, except students. Even though many of
the loans are originated by the state, most of them are serviced by
private or quasi-private companies like Navient - which until 2014 was
the student-loan arm of Sallie Mae - or Nelnet, companies that
reported a combined profit of around $1 billion last year (the U.S.
government made a profit of $1.6 billion in 2016!). Debt-collector
companies like Performant (which generated
$141.4 million in revenues; the family of Betsy DeVos is a major
investor), and most particularly the colleges and universities, get to
prey on the desperation and terror of parents and young people, and in
the process rake in vast sums virtually without fear of market consequence.
About that: Universities, especially public institutions, have
successfully defended rising tuition in recent years by blaming the
hikes on reduced support from states. But this explanation was blown
to bits in large part due to a bizarre slip-up in the middle of a
controversy over state support of the University of Wisconsin system a few
years ago.
In that incident, UW raised tuition by 5.5 percent six years in a row
after 2007. The school blamed stresses from the financial crisis and
decreased state aid. But when pressed during a state committee hearing
in 2013 about the university's finances, UW system president Kevin
Reilly admitted they held $648 million in reserve, including $414 million in
tuition payments.
This was excess hidey-hole cash the school was sitting on, separate
and distinct from, say, an endowment fund.
After the university was showered with criticism for hoarding cash at
a time when it was gouging students with huge price increases every
year, the school responded by saying, essentially, it only did what
all the other kids were doing. UW released data showing that other
major state-school systems across the country were similarly stashing
huge amounts of cash. While Wisconsin's surplus was only 25 percent of
its operating budget, for instance, Minnesota's was 29 percent, and
Illinois maintained a whopping 34 percent reserve.
When Collinge, of Student Loan Justice, looked into it, he found that
the phenomenon wasn't confined to state schools. Private schools, too,
have been hoarding cash even as they plead poverty and jack up tuition
fees. "They're all doing it," he says.
While universities sit on their stockpiles of cash and the loan
industry generates record profits, the pain of living in debilitating
debt for many lasts into retirement. Take Veronica Martish. She's a
68-year-old veteran, having served in the armed forces in the Vietnam
era. She's also a grandmother who's never been in trouble and considers
herself a patriot.
"The thing is, I tried to do everything right in my life," she says.
"But this ruined my life."
This is an $8,000 student loan she took out in 1989, through Sallie Mae.
She
borrowed the money so she could take courses at Quinebaug Valley
Community College in Connecticut. Five years later, after deaths in
her family, she fell behind on her payments and entered a loan-rehabilitation
program.
"That's when my nightmare began," she says.
In rehabilitation, Martish's $8,000 loan, with fees and interest,
ballooned into a $27,000 debt, which she has been carrying ever since.
She says she's paid more than $63,000 to date and is nowhere near
discharging the principal. "By the time I die," she says, "I will
probably pay more than
$200,000 toward an $8,000 loan." She pauses. "It's a scam, you see.
Nothing ever comes off the loan. It's all interest and fees. And they
chase you until you're old, like me. They never stop. Ever."
And that's the other thing about lending to students: It's the safest
grift around.
There's probably no better symbol of the bankruptcy of the education
industry than Trump University. The half-literate president's effort
at higher learning drew in suckers with pathetic promises of great
real-estate insights (for instance, that Trump "hand-picked" the
instructors) and then charged them truckfuls of cash for
get-rich-quick tutorials that students and faculty later described as
"almost completely worthless" and a "total lie." That Trump got to
settle a lawsuit on this matter for $25 million and still managed to
be elected president is, ironically, a remarkable testament to the
failure of our education system. About the only example that might be
worse is DeVry University, which told students that 90 percent of
graduates seeking jobs found them in their fields within six months of
graduation.
The
FTC found those claims "false and unsubstantiated," and ordered $100
million in refunds and debt relief, but that was in 2016 - before
Trump put DeVry chief Schmoke, of all people, in charge of rooting out
education fraud.
Like
a lot of things connected to politics lately, it would be funny if it
weren't somehow actually happening. "Yeah, it's the fox guarding the
henhouse," says Collinge. "You could probably find a worse analogy."
But the real problem with the student-loan story is that it's so
poorly understood by people not living the nightmare. There's so much
propaganda that blames the borrowers for taking on the debt in the
first place that there's often little sympathy for people in hopeless
situations. To make matters worse, band-aid programs that supposedly
offer help hypnotize the public into thinking there are ways out, when
the "help" is usually just another trick to add to the balance.
"That's part of the problem with the narrative," says Nailor, the
schoolteacher. "People think that there's help, so what are you
complaining about? All you got to do is apply for help."
But the help, he says, coming from a for-profit predatory system,
often just makes things worse. "It did for me," he says. "It does for
a lot of people."
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