Perhaps the only issue that gets under our skin is how some flaming douchebags want to make money off middle class college students. These are kids who have good enough grades to get into college, but whose parents don’t have the money to pay for school, nor the grades to have a full ride. President George W. Bush, who is one of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to achieve national elective success, managed to get into and graduate from Yale because he had the right last name. Most of us aren’t so lucky.
Hence there are reasons why there’s a portion of the electorate who have paid attention to what has happened over the past few years of Congressional misleadership who are a little pissed off at how elected leaders have sold out to banks and financial service companies. Seriously, why would you fuck over middle class students who are putting debt on their backs to get a college degree unless you were totally bought off? Some elected officials didn’t seem to give a damn.
While the Democratic majority in the Congress has been lame, for the most part, since taking over the legislative branch, it has done a decent job of helping out college students to where they can get a degree without selling their souls to the company store.
Student loan giant Sallie Mae has already spent more than a quarter million dollars (that we know of) on newspaper ads trying to stop the bill, along with at least $3 million on lobbying. Another anti-student aid group hired the PR firm Qorvis Communications that offered to pay “experts” to write op-eds and appear on TV to criticize an investigation into AIG a few years ago.
That’s fucked up. We know people who work at Qorvis, and we thought, while the company makes bank and is a major PR and public affairs firm in DC, it wouldn’t be this evil. Guess not. If you give enough money to those guys, they’ll try to make sure students who are putting tens of thousands of dollars on their back should get nailed to the wall. After all, if you’re a wealthy financial services organization, you should be allowed to prey on kids in their early 20s.
It’s beyond time for college finance to get fixed. Unfortunately, banks have more money than God to fuck over kids so that they can bring in more cash.
Early Thursday morning, Sen. Kevin Bryant put up a post (referring from padded-cell winner Michelle Malkin) citing an English lord making remarks to the effect of President Barack Obama ceding American sovereignty. One would have thought this sort of silliness would have been shut down in the ’50s, or when the John Birch Society was at its height of yelling at clouds.
Why is this something that people, elected officials, are concerned about enough to post? There are enough real issues for conservatives to nail the Obama administration with. You can call your shot, between health care, cap and trade, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on. This is why the voters haven’t gone wholesale to the GOP, as this year so closely resembles 1993.
Really, what the fuck? The spin is eerily reminiscent of the sort of thing we’d hear from the fools who advised the George W. Bush administration and the early-aughts Congress. Those guys thought it was a brilliant idea to take a machete to taxes for the wealthiest Americans, while going after middle-class college students. Seriously, they cut taxes for millionaires while eliminating parts of the Pell Grant program and giving finance companies a gift by allowing them to outrageously jack up interest rates on student loans.
One of the saving graces of the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 was actually doing a damn about student aid. But, being Democrats, it was a weak effort and spaced out over a long enough period that they might as well have done nothing. Tip o’ the hat, U.S. Reps. Pelosi and Hoyer.
See, here’s the thing: higher education isn’t an elective anymore. This is a knowledge-based economy. Unless you’re a from a wealthy, connected family that can get you into Yale with shitty grades, or an overachiever with no life, you’re going to need grants and loans to get by if you want a college degree. Yeah, you can take 12-16 hours a semester and work a part-time job and still try to do it, but you need help. Hell, we had to explain the entire thing to our parents, who didn’t understand. Selling off the last bit of the family plantation financed our dad’s education, and our mom is the offspring of union members. Between years of slavery and collectivism (respectively), they were covered. The 21st century, though, is a different place.
You want to win elections? Tell parents who are looking at balance statements that you know how to make sure their children get a proper education, and in a way to where you aren’t raiding the parents’ wallets. That’s what people care about. If you think the average voter is obsessively concerned about U.N. troops patrolling Five Points, you’d be very mistaken.
