Grifting on Our Future
Student loans are predatory capitalism at its most shamefully short-sighted
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 6–3 decision to not allow the student loan forgiveness program that Congress agreed to and President Joe Biden planned to sign once again throws into light not only the ideological fervor of the current hard-right court but also our woeful corporate, profit-driven system of higher education.
After a 3-year suspension of payments of federal student loans under both the Trump and the Biden administrations due to financial hardship caused by the pandemic, Republicans were keen to see that payments begin again and made it a central demand in their most recent toddler-style meltdown — embarrassingly heard across the world — over the debt ceiling.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent (joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Katanji Brown-Jackson), noted that the court was usurping the power of Congress and was acting in an unconstitutional way.
Whether or not unconstitutional, the majority was certainly acting in an unthinking way about the future of our country as an economic power. But, as Mike Lofgren recently noted in Salon, the term conservative intellectual is pretty much an oxymoron. To borrow a famous (and perhaps misunderstood) Gertrude Stein quote about a late-life visit to her childhood home, Oakland, California, when it comes to so-called conservative intellectuals, there is no there there, just ever more ridiculous defenses of the ruthless machinations of the wealthy and powerful, twisted justifications of authoritarianist moves. Thus, they needed their own media to push “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories.
As Lofgren puts the conservatives’ need to ignore so many areas of knowledge, such as science and, more recently, history: “This is why conservatives habitually retreat into mysticism, gut feelings and the wisdom of our fathers when the facts are against them. It is more accurate to say that conservatism is a counter-intellectual activity that sometimes employs the trappings of intellectual discourse.”
Lofgren’s description of the right’s “trappings of intellectual discourse” brings to mind the current “fauxriginalists” on the Supreme Court who often choose to hide their thinking by making significant decisions by shadow docket or even happily entertain wholly fabricated cases they would like to rule on.
As for America’s system of piling debt on our future teachers, journalists, and healthcare workers — literally grifting on our prospects as a people and as a nation — one might think of the ouroboros, that mythical snake that devours itself. A more apt metaphor might be the brown-headed cowbird, which doesn’t bother to build a nest but lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and has them do the work of raising the extra chick. Think of student debt as that unwanted egg, a sudden and long-lasting burden. It was laid by the cowbird lenders in the dorm rooms of eighteen-year-olds before they even got there, and once they are out of college, looking to start building their nest eggs, it is crippling.
People with lower-paying jobs find they may never pay off even smaller loans, which keep swelling with interests and fees; others who studied to go into higher-paid lines of work (say, as doctors or veterinarians) are burdened for decades by the larger loans they needed for their extended educations.
The future of America is so closely connected to student loans it’s practically a diphthong — if paired vowels could ever make an unpleasant grinding sound. Young people coming out of overpriced colleges burdened with student debt payments cannot purchase that car or first house or marry or consider raising a lovely (and expensive) child. With our truly screwed-up system of high-cost childcare with low-paid workers and a meager social safety net that one political party constantly threatens, our country is anything but “pro-life” for any age group; it’s merely pro-profit.
My older brother has spent his career as an attorney assisting people with fewer means who must deal with the scuzzy machinations of payroll lenders, car dealers, and landlords who prey on the poor. He might quibble with my take on student loans as being predatory capitalism at its worst, but I think he wouldn’t quibble much. Student lenders are well-dressed, well-spoken mobsters saying, It would be a shame if you didn’t have the proper credentials to find meaningful or remunerative work.
What Biden recognizes is that getting those credentials will often keep young people from starting their lives or, really, feeling much hope for their future in general. When he proposed student debt forgiveness a year ago, he said, “People can start finally to climb out from under that mountain of debt.” (I believe our current president, a lawyer who has suffered great personal loss, is something of a Lincolnesque figure who wants the best not only for his supporters but for all Americans — something Trumpist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently inadvertently highlighted. And, as many are finally starting to recognize, he has shown that experienced, steady statesmanship matters and has had an incredibly successful first term.)
Except in Florida and other areas of the country not interested in actual U.S. history, one must always bear in mind that much of the country was built by slaves and indentured minorities and prisoners. Those unmentionable facts seem sweet nostalgia for many Republicans in Congress and in state leadership positions who now openly pine for the days of the old South and call workers’ rights or higher minimum wages “socialism” and wonder aloud what, oh, Hitler might have to say about it all.
Parents who can afford to start early with regular savings and put their children through college without incurring debt will often suffer in some other way — by not maintaining their home or by cutting back on feeding retirement funds. Grandparents try to kick in, too. Ah, American exceptionalism! Call it the First Sociodynamic Law of Supporting Your Kids’ Education: As energy cannot escape a black hole, some party will inescapably be held back by education loans; who’s it gonna be?
The Republican politicians (and all those FEDSOC-indoctrinated Supreme Court justices) wholeheartedly support those profiting mightily off of college students, and, unsurprisingly, they don’t want those students to vote.
The defunding of state universities by Republican legislatures and the subsequent corporatization of higher education, with high-paid administrators and criminally low-paid adjunct professors (and absurdly paid football and basketball coaches), along with the arms race on campuses to erect more buildings and offer ever-more posh dormitories, means that college is the fastest growing cost in the country and people carry twice as much student loans as they did even just 10 years ago. About 60% of adults aged 18–49 have student loan debt.
Meanwhile, the affirmative action program of legacy and donor admissions, which overwhelmingly preferences white students who need no loans, raises no eyebrows among the conservatives on the high court.
Still, there are some steps borrowers can take to limit the pain, including signing up for automatic payments and checking on whether an income-driven repayment plan is available. For his part, President Biden will ask his secretary of education to use the Higher Education Act of 1965 to justify some level of student loan forgiveness and try to tweak some things around the edges for low- and middle-income borrowers. The Biden Administration is also working to make the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program easier to use, beyond what they already accomplished to make applications simpler, and more effective for people in public service or non-profit jobs. The Department of Education recently announced it plans to discharge $39 billion in debt from some 800,000 borrowers.
It’s ho-hum axiomatic to say that voting has consequences. And yet the future of the United States depends on our electing a Congress not so crammed full of theocratic, white-mansplaining, climate change–denying Republican grifters, who fight only for those who need no further help. We need to fill it with citizens who were raised with a capacity to reason and feel empathy.
This kind of indebtedness for higher education just doesn’t happen in other civilized countries because they tax people fairly and offer more benefits to all in return. But in this country, Shakespeare’s famous “seven ages of man” soliloquy, from “As You Like It,” might be recast for the vast majority of citizens by simply changing the diaper-at-birth-and-at-death genius bit to the absurd hospital bill for your birth to the reverse mortgage that strips your heirs of family wealth. All America’s a grift/and all the men and women merely debtors.
What the President was asking for was minimal, but it would have helped tens of millions of people and given them a chance to start their lives — with all the economic benefit that comes when people are allowed to start their lives. As the student debt cancellation group We, The 45 Million says, “College shouldn’t be a gift from parents to their children — it should be a right to all future students.”
