I love this! I must admit I am numero uno crappiest generation member. One-tenth of a second is too long wait!
"How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago." -- Louis CK
And after three days of drinkin' with Larry LoveRead more...
I just get an inklin' to go on home
So, I'm walkin' down Coldharbour Lane
Head hung low, three or four in the mornin'
The suns comin' up and the birds are out singing
I let myself into my pad
Wind myself up that spiral staircase
An' stretch out nice on the chesterfield
Pithecanthropus Erectus already on the CD player
And I just push that remote button to sublimity
And listen to the sweet sculptural rhythms of Charles Mingus
And J.R. Monterose and Jackie Mclean
Duet on those saxophones
And the sound makes it's way outta the window
Minglin' with the traffic noises outside, you know and
All of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality
'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world
Comin' up on forty-one years
Forty-one stoney gray steps towards the grave
You know the box, awaits it's grissly load
Now, I'm gonna be food for worms
And just like Charles Mingus wrote
That beautiful piece-a music, 'Epitaph for Eric Dolphy'
I say, so long Eric, so long, John Coltrane
And Charles Mingus, so long, Duke Ellington
And Lester Young, so long, Billie Holliday
And Ella Fitzgerald, so long, Jimmy Reed
So long, Muddy Waters, and so, long Howlin' Wolf
What if every American high school student - no matter how intelligent, and/or talented and who couldn't afford to pay the astronomical cost of higher education - decides that the intractable, insurmountable and ever increasing debt that the student loan industry, by law, can impose upon them, is not worth the aggravation and risk? What would our society look like in ten years? Twenty years? One hundred years?
According to Alan Michael Collinge, author of The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History - and How We Can Fight Back.” and creator of the website Student Loan Justice, in the 1970’s, all the consumer protections were on the table for student loans. Then, gradually, stories about numerous individuals borrowing large amounts of money to finance their education, subsequently, declaring bankruptcy, started spreading.
Congress used these stories as an excuse, to first restrict, and then remove all bankruptcy protection, statute of limitations, and the right of students to refinance their debt at better terms for the life of the loan. Student lenders are exempt from Truth in Lending Laws and most Fair Debt Collection Practices. After all was said and done, it turned out that less than 1% of federally guaranteed loans were discharged through bankruptcy at the time these stories started to spread. The “student loan” crisis was "only in the imagination of the student loan industry."
Debt is extremely lucrative for this industry. It is reported that the default rate for student loans is approximately 5%, when in actuality, it is closer to 20-30%. What they don’t tell you is that the 5% rate of default is only calculated on the first two years after a student graduates. It’s far more profitable for some of the bigger lenders for students to default on their loans because (Sallie Mae, Nelnet) not only do these large entities own lending companies but they own collection companies in addition to serving as the guarantor function as well.
For example, in the case of Sallie Mae, they can default a loan and be paid near book value from the board of education and then come back for a much bigger chunk, considering the inflated amount after penalties, fees and outrageous default rates are applied. Some of these "sharks" are defaulting loans without even trying to collect on the debt. Even the federal government makes money from delinquent debt, recovering about $1.20 for every dollar it pays out in default claims.
Under President Reagan, grants were transformed into loans, which allowed banks to enter the mix in order to profit. This lending system enables universities and colleges to raise tuition at double the consumer index rather than plow through the laborious task of appealing to the state and federal government. This system not only shifts the burden of cost from the state to the students, but enables banks to profit enormously at the student’s expense. In addition our taxpayer dollars go toward paying subsidies to private lenders like Sallie Mae, public enemy #1, who started out as a government sponsored entity and then privatized in 1995, forming one of the most powerful lobbies on Capital Hill.
As federal grant aid has decreased over the last eight years, federal aid to providers of costlier and riskier private student loans increased. Fast forward to November 2008, and a "shark" bailout is on the table. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) expressed their "gratitude and support" for the proposed bailout to "aid banks and organizations that issue federal student loans," encouraging an extension of the financial backing to non-federal loans, as well.
Fortunately, President Obama, who experienced, first hand, the stranglehold of student loan debt, created the Access and Completion Incentive Fund, which will help low-income students graduate from college, and is part of a larger package of reforms including the elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL)--that is, the program in which the federal government guarantees and subsidizes student loans made by banks and other for-profit companies.
Thomas Jefferson recognized the importance of an educated citizenry in a working democracy. He believed in a "natural aristocracy" of virtue, ability and talent over the "tinsel aristocracy" of inherited wealth and privilege. He believed the state should fund education in order to foster, encourage and stimulate the talent and intelligence across all socioeconomic lines. Jefferson would be appalled at the idea of our government allowing banks to exploit our young people - our nation's future - for profit.
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." -- Thomas JeffersonIf our usurious student loan shark system, and the massive wealth it generates at the expense of American students is exposed, the "tinsel aristocracy" will prevail at our colleges and universities, while much greater minds and talents abandon ideas of furthering their education, which in turn, will guarantee the fall of the American "empire".
My student loan was originally with Sallie Mae. In 2007 I supposedly went into default. Sallie Mae presented me with paperwork to sign and said my loand was in default. They garnished my wages for $340 a month about a year ago. It was not until I got my 1098 this year showing how much interest I paid and I began to dig deeply into my student loan that I saw that Sallie Mae turned the loan over to General Revenue Corp which is a collection agency OWNED BY SALLIE MAE. This is wrong.
Secondly, I determined they are charging me 26% interest!
I have written to the US dept of education and they tell me the loan must stay at the original interest rate unless a court changes the rate. There was never any court involved. They are also charging me close to $5,000 in collection fees! I understand from the Dept of Education they can charge fees BUT how can they justify that amount of fees when there was not attorney involved - nothing.
Basically Sallie Mae dumped me to General Credit (again Sallie mae owns them) and now I am paying HUGE interest AND my loans will never be paid off. When they tossed me into default my credit was DESTROYED. I also read you can rehabilitate but you have to pay 9 consecutive payments and you CANNOT include the wage attachment - how can I afford that? I am sending documentation to Sallie Mae, General Credit, my former senator (VP Joseph Biden, my Congressman Mike Castle and Senator Carper) What they have done to me is illegal.
John t
Bear, Delaware
U.S.A.
As a co-signer on a loan for my nephew, I believe that Sallie Mae has violated the terms of the loan by repeatedly issuing forebearances on the loan (which causes significant increases on the balance due to the additional interest) without seeking my consent, and without providing me with any proper notification at all.
[...]
Sallie Mae has boldly stated that they do not need my consent to alter the terms of the loan, and they keep trying to insist that they sent me notification of the forebearances, even though they have the correct address for me, and I have not moved since the loan has been in repayment.
They have managed to send me threating letters when my nephew has failed to make payments on the loan, but somehow the forebearance notices never did come.
Larry
Sherman Oaks, California
U.S.A.
[...] Now i'm being sued by sallie mae for not making my payments. i faxed a forbearance paper to stop my loans going into colllections but the collections company told me it was a third party loan sent out by sallie mae and that i couldn;t put it in forbearance.
i need help with advice before i go to court. i wish everyone else who has problems with both sallie mae and itt get together and get a class action law suit against them. or if anyone can help me i would greatly appreciate it. thanks
kristen
brightin, Michigan
U.S.A.
[...] It has been two years since I left Brooks. My loans are now deffered and already up to $41,000 because of interest. I feel that I was very misled and deceived by Brooks College and their sales staff. Now I have learned that the school is shut down because of all the lawsuits against it. I have many friends that I met through brooks that are suffering from the same situation with their student loans. We need justice with this non-accredited college!
Noel
Encinitas, California
U.S.A.
It has been two years since I left Brooks. My loans are now deffered and already up to $41,000 because of interest. I feel that I was very misled and deceived by Brooks College and their sales staff. Now I have learned that the school is shut down because of all the lawsuits against it. I have many friends that I met through brooks that are suffering from the same situation with their student loans. We need justice with this non-accredited college!Read more...
Noel
Encinitas, California
U.S.A.
"On a stifling July day in 1918, 18,000 officers and soldiers posed as Lady Liberty on the parade [drill] grounds at Camp Dodge." [This area was west of Baker St. and is currently the area around building S34 and to the west.] "According to a July 3, 1986, story in the Fort Dodge Messenger, many men fainted-they were dressed in woolen uniforms-as the temperature neared 105 degrees Farenheit. The photo, taken from the top of a specially constructed tower by a Chicago photography studio, Mole & Thomas, was intended to help promote the sale of war bonds but was never used."
“Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.” -- Thomas Jefferson
Mahatma Gandhi's seven deadly sins:
• Wealth without Work
• Pleasure without Conscience
• Science without Humanity
• Knowledge without Character
• Politics without Principle
• Commerce without Morality
• Worship without Sacrifice
"Why am I a homosexual if I'm affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers were meant as role models, there should be a lot of nuns running around the streets today." -- Harvey Milk
Back in November, I blogged that Henry Paulson's "the sky is falling" reaction in September was staged (In this crash for cash scheme, the criminals targeted innocent taxpayers) in order to panic we the people and Congress, so that he could shove Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) down our throats with no provisions to pay taxpayers back, and even more importantly, no limits or penalties on top executives - can't forget the three-page Paulson Doctrine declaring him ruler of the universe.
“Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple of thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no.” -- Democratic Congressman Brad ShermanWhen Senator James Inhofe was asked who was issuing the warnings of a depression and marital law prior to the bailout being passed, Inhofe responded:
“That’s Henry Paulson. We had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced. He said the crisis would be far worse than the great depression if Congress didn’t authorize the bill to buy out toxic debt, a proposal which he abandoned the day after he got the money."On February 20, Dean Baker posted, Did Ben Bernanke pull the TARP over our Eyes? in his blog, Beat the Press and stated the "reason" for this urgency:
One of the important factors behind the urgency was the claim that even healthy non-financial companies (e.g. Verizon or Boeing) could not borrow in commercial paper markets to get the credit they needed to meet their payrolls and pay their other bills. Ben Bernanke contributed to this view when he answered a question at a press conference:Baker then provides new evidence that the September panic might have been nothing more than an act
"I see the financial markets as already quite fragile. The credit markets aren't working. Corporations aren't able to finance themselves through commercial paper."
The weekend after Congress passed the TARP, Bernanke announced that the Fed would begin to directly buy the commercial paper of non-financial corporations.
At a speech at the Press Club this week, Bernanke was asked why he waited until after the TARP was approved before he began buying up commercial paper of non-financial corporations. He responded:Now, in addition to TARP, another four-lettered acronym can be added to the effort to thaw out credit and restore lending: TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). The idea behind TALF is that "lenders using the TALF would be willing to retain more of the risk associated with loans on their own books to get deals done. That should help ensure that lenders make better-quality loans in the future, because they will be liable for most of the losses."
"Well, look at the calendar. The financial crisis intensified in mid-September and got worse to the point where there was a huge global financial crisis in early October. During that interim, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which includes the TARP. And that TARP, the money there was very useful in helping to stabilize the banking system in early October. There was this critical moment. I think it was about the 14th of October, following a G7 meeting here in Washington, where not The United States but countries around the world took very strong actions in terms of capital, in terms of guarantees and other actions to try to stabilize the world banking
system.
It was during this period that the commercial paper market and the money markets, money market mutual funds showed the worst stress. It was in those 18 weeks that that stress appeared and those markets began to dysfunction. And we can't set these programs up immediately. It takes a bit of time to get them structured legally and to arrange for the market terms and to work with market participants and so on. But we got it going actually quite quickly. It's been now more than three months since the commercial paper facility has been functioning. And it seems to have had notable impact on both commercial paper rates and on the terms of finance available."
"Destiny, the fatum, or the inner voice, tells you where you have to wind up and what you’re destined to do, but it doesn’t tell you how to get there or how to do it…
Aeneas cannot choose not to found Rome; he’s destined to create it. But he as to wrestle with himself, inch by inch, hour by hour — play by play! — to figure out how to endure the struggle and torment of doing it, and take all the bad breaks along the way.
As I sat there, an impressionable, twentieth-century seventeen-year-old, I wasn’t really swallowing Virgil’s brand of fatalism. But I sensed him speaking to me with a broader and deeper kind of truth.
It was terrifying that Aeneas’ beloved Troy had to be destroyed. But what I absorbed as we read was that the founding of Rome had a cost — Troy’s defeat and Aeneas’ years of torment. No accomplishment comes without suffering. Humanum est pati. “To be alive is to suffer.” Virgil wasn’t saying something as simple-headed as “No pain, no gain.” That implies you can choose between suffering and taking life easy. To Virgil, nobody gets to choose not to suffer.
And nobody is guaranteed a reward, a victory, in repayment for his suffering. The best man, the best team, isn’t automatically entitled to win. The winds of fate can turn you around, run you aground, sink you, and sometimes you can’t do a thing about it. However, just to make the commitment to something you believe in is winning — even if you lose the game. But for committing yourself to winning the game, whether you win or not, you always pay in tears and in blood." -- Joe Paterno
Okay, here I go again with another "thrusting tiger/devoured human" analogy, only this time it's about real criminals, or at least the ones who can't afford to commit crimes and get away it.
Anyway, if our prison system continues on the same path, we will all be the guy on the elephant down the road. Watch Prison Nation on National Geographic to see the results of the starkly black and white, "get tough on crime" legislation - including the "three strikes law". Ironically, many of the legislators and business leaders who participated in the creation and passing of "get tough on crime" legislation are the same people who, over the last three decades, helped to institutionalize the corruption we - as well as people all over the world - are all paying for right now.
Hidden within our country is a dark, parallel world — a Prison Nation that is inhabited by 2.2 million American convicts. Increasing violence, extreme crowding, rampant drug use and gang warfare are part of daily life.
We the people don't like high prices or high taxes, no matter what the cost, and politicians - if they want to stay employed, that is - know that they better give Americans what they want, no matter what the cost.
Unfortunately, the cost of low prices can be huge, as it upsets the natural ebb and flow of the supply and demand cycle, supposedly so crucial to the functioning of the "free market". Ironically, it's the "free market" advocates who disrupt this natural process the most, usually in favor of big business.
According to Michael Pollan, Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at University of California at Berkeley and author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, wrote an open letter, Farmer in Chief, in The New York Times Magazine to the next President, this type of interference corrupted our food system.
President Nixon, realizing that escalating food prices could be politically disastrous, ordered Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture at the time, to redesign America's farm policy in order to drive down the price of food. Butz more than surpassed President Nixon's expectations, however, his success may be chiefly responsible for our downfall if we don't do something soon.
In a nutshell, Butz transformed a regional food system, that produced nutritious, diverse, "solar based" calories into a huge, highly efficient agricultural industry that produces mostly empty, fossil-fuel based calories. Considering we are what we eat, "My Mother the Car" should be making a comeback any time now.
“...to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution—animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete—and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” -- Wendell BarryRead more...
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