The jig is up. The college kids of America will be returning to the streets to protest, set cars on fire and fight with cops. Why? They’re starting to realize they’ve been sold a false bill of goods by the left, as Captain Capitalism writes:
Understand education is how the left survives. Shamelessly by targeting young, ignorant and uneducated children and brainwashing them into believing in socialism. But now with the recession continuing on into Obama’s 3rd year and no turn around or promises coming true or being delivered upon, the youth I believe will turn against the left faster than most of us could hope.
I’m personally surprised it hasn’t happened already. Too much debt, no jobs and no way out is not going to end peacefully or amicably. The chickens of the student loan industry and their Washington whores are coming home to roost. Check out these videos from the Captain’s post to see a taste of what’s to come:
Some people have criticized my advocacy of a student loan jubilee by saying that college kids who made bad decisions don’t deserve to be bailed out. Well, as Clint Eastwood said, “deserved” hasn’t got anything to do with it. We need a student loan jubilee to keep the angry, unemployed hordes from storming the Bastille and dragging the royalty to the guillotines. It’s not about what THEY deserve, it’s about YOUR survival. But hey, just keep repeating those mantras of “self-reliance” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” – I hear the grave’s a fine and private place.
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we will be free at last!
{ 40 comments… read them below or add one }
What the fuck are people doing wrong when it comes to the economy? I don’t have any degrees, just an aptitude to learn quickly and one of them old fashioned “work ethics,” and I’m about to land a full time, $20/hr position.
That girl is pretty and reasonably intelligent. Selling jewelry is an appropriate job for her, but you don’t need a college degree to do that. I’m guessing she has a sociology degree or something similarly impractical.
In times past tuition was lower, and people mostly didn’t borrow to cover living expenses. The people I knew who borrowed went to state schools and either did OK or dropped out quickly. If you had student loan debt from useless schooling or training it wasn’t huge. The trend in recent years, the most egregious example being the guy in the NYT who went to Thomas Jefferson law school, has been to borrow for four years of private school tuition and living expenses. These people are beyond screwed.
She said she was trying to become an “anchor,” which I took to mean news anchor. I wasn’t aware you necessarily needed a college degree for that, either.
“We need a student loan jubilee to keep the angry, unemployed hordes from storming the Bastille and dragging the royalty to the guillotines.”
Concessions just create a demand for more concessions. All you need to stop the hordes are machine guns and the willingness to use them.
[So how did that work out for the Romanovs again? - ed.]
Pour la canaille, il faut la mitraille!
FYI..
—-
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/the_future_is_g.html
MIT talk on how the future is likely to be dominated by the aged and the infirm, especially women living alone once men die, and what that means for reengineering society.
“We need a student loan jubilee to keep the angry, unemployed hordes from storming the Bastille and dragging the royalty to the guillotines.”
You say that as though it were a bad thing.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier - ed.]
Thankfully the Founders did not share that attitude. They knew that when all else fails to right the wrongs committed on the many by the few, force is the final argument.
Pray God that is will never be necessary, but unfortunately, as a man once said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
And machine guns require people not only willing to use them but willing to use them against their fellow citizens. If there ever is serious widespread violent civil unrest, I would fully expect that the police and military to be riven with dissension and eventually split into factions along with every other state institution. It would be a catastrophic nightmare.
A lot of the young people are still blaming the right or the “corporations.” Dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs does not automatically translate into anger at the left. It’s all about who takes the blame.
But, yeah, these kids should be pissed off. They are the most sheltered generation of all time, and now they’re being thrown out into the shittiest economy in decades. I don’t think any generation has had a fall from grace like that, excepting maybe people whose country was invaded by foreign powers.
Coldequation – our country -has- been so invaded
This has been pretty much been going on since the 80′s, i’ve written about it since my college days. this isn’t an Obama thing, it’s a lie since a highschool degree became worthless and the lie that everyone should go to university instead of just people looking to go into specific professions.
For two decades if not more a bachelors degree is now worthless. I’ve been saying for years that going to school is worthless unless you are going to school for a specific reason, i.e. Law, Medical.
but people just kept racking up loans and had to work at jobs with people with no degree just to pay if off. There are no jobs now, but come on, the good jobs have flown our nations along time ago. This set of circumstances is just the result of our society failing to see the writing on the wall.
It has been a long time coming. Don’t be too wrapped up in your own political veiw point to see reality. Even men on the Forbes list are saying that going to university is not a good investment. Now even the establishment is saying this. Crazy, but this is the world we live in. University was the biggest lie of our generation.
One other thing should be noted about a potential student loan jubilee: since the federal government has guaranteed student loans to lenders, they don’t allow students to default from their loans. As such, it is likely that most student loans are offered in bad faith, which makes them null anyway.
The only bubble here is in bullshit majors (sociology, philosophy, anything with the word “studies” in it)
I got a degree in electrical engineering and it paid off in a big way. I’m in my mid 30s and making $250-$300K a year in Silicon Valley. There’s no bubble in learning to do something marketable.
I’m glad you were able to get a forum to brag about yourself, but your whole comment was pointless and contributed nothing. THE WHOLE NATURE OF THE TERM “BUBBLE” IS THAT IT REFERS TO WORTHLESS, UNMARKETABLE PRODUCTS THAT ARE OVERPRICED. Pointing out that a bubble does not apply to your difficult, challenging, marketable degree is stating the obvious.
It would be like an article specifically about the dotcom bubble and you chimed in with “that doesn’t apply to really well-researched, financially sound blue chip stocks,” or an article about a real estate bubble and you chimed in with “that doesn’t apply to well-priced property in neighborhoods with a long history of safety and long-term potential.” DUHH! By definition “bubbles” refer to things of questionable value being ridiculously overpriced at a comparable level as the good products.
Why limit a “Jubilee” to just student loans? Why not a “Jubilee” to each and every indentured servant coast to coast and in the process eliminate the banking system as it currently exists? We are all forced to gamble in their casino, at their tables, and remember, the house always wins. And for the usurer, they have the perfect racket going. The government provides them not just “protection”, but the usurers now own and control the regulatory mechanisms in the government as well. Remember that “revolving door” between Goldman-Sachs and the Treasury?
The fix is in, and has been for decades on end.
The entire usury industry is nothing but out and out theft to begin with, as the so-called “money” that they “loan” is literally created out of thin air. “Money” as it is currently called does not exist until a loan is made, and then it is nothing more than a book keeping entry that in truth is the lock on the cell that enslaves us all.
Think about it for a moment. Did the privately owned “Federal Reserve” (See: Lewis v. United States, 680F.2d 1239 (1982) actually “have” the 12 trillion dollars that they bailed out the “Too big to fail” banks both here and abroad with? What about the 600 trillion tied up in derivatives right now? How can that figure represent real money? The trillions “loaned” on mortgages and other consumer debt? No they didn’t. They made book-keeping entries and “Poof!”, “money” appears, “money” the “lender” never had to begin with, and then the hapless borrower pays these cretins interest for decades on end on a “principal” that never tangibly existed in the first place. We end up forced to give the sweat of our brows for decades on end to creatures who charge us for something they never really had in the first place.
Buy a $200,000 dollar house and you are out between $450,00 to $600,000 after 30 years depending on how “deserving” your three-piece suited slaver thought you were. And the less deserving you are in their eyes the higher the rate of usury they charge you, increasing your chance of remaining even less deserving than you were to begin with – forever.
To paraphrase George Carlin: “They’re all in the same club and we’re not in it.” None of us. So you get a “Student Loan Jubilee” and then what? Do those that follow you receive the same? No. How about the thirty year screw-over on your home? No. They will just keep on screwing everyone and with the imprimatur of the whores they have in government, continue to give themselves each millions in bonuses at the end of each “fiscal year.”
The twelve trillion plus that the Fed and our so-called “Representative Government” wasted saving those banks (some estimates have the figure at over 20 trillion), i.e., saving other members of “The Club”, would have paid off every mortgage in the country and the entirety of the student loan debt as well. Why didn’t that happen? Because it would look bad on the “asset” sheet. The slaves wouldn’t owe the “Club Members” anything, therefore they wouldn’t be able to take that sweat off your brow, would they? You can diss God all you want, but that Biblical line that argues “The borrower is the slave to the lender” has been proven true for millenia. A call for a Jubilee is a call to be let out of bondage, nothing more and nothing less. Ergo, we are slaves.
“The West” outlawed usury for almost 1700 years, and for all the right reasons. Over the last 300, quite slowly at first but over the last 100 in an all-controlling and consuming fury, the practice has come to dominate all economic behavior, from the lowest reaches of society to the highest offices of government. Debt, debt, and more debt, and no one can honestly say that anyone or any institution or a conglomeration of them actually had monies to loan. The whole system of finance is a pyramid of lies built upon a foundation of falsehood.
It is well past time for “Fight Club.” Andrew Jackson, where are you?
You’re missing my point. Ferdinand is asserting there is a “college loan scam.” It’s half true and half false. I used student loans during one particularly tough year at the university and they helped me tremendously. I would have had to delay my graduation without them. The root cause of the problem isn’t student loans.
When I was in college and saw people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to study bullshit degrees, I could see that it would not have a happy ending. I could see that with clarity even when I was eighteen. These problem that these people have isn’t that the system is taking advantage of them. (It is, but that’s not the root cause of the problem.) The problem is that they’re as dumb as rocks. They allow themselves to be tooled. Let’s not confuse the symptom with the cause.
The largest class of people in the world are ones without connections, nor gumption, nor vision, nor intelligence. Like, for instance, that ditz in the video who works in the jewelry store. These people will always find a way to get tooled by the strong and powerful. That’s the way it was, the way it is, and the way it always will be. If student loans didn’t exist, she just would have found some other way to be tooled by some other master. The times change, and the tools and methods change, but the plebeians will always be the plebeians. So it goes.
To me the interesting point is what will the Left will do to replicate itself without the higher ed indoctrination houses to do the minting of new Marxists/Progressives.
PS indoctrination takes one so far down the left-wing road.
More insight…
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rep/student-loan-debt-bubble.html
Couple of observations:
1) I’m wondering what time of the day they filmed the first vid. Even at 6% unemployment where I am (which is low compared to other places), the shopping centers look that empty in a week day during the middle of the day.
2) I watched the first video on mute and I thought it was an intro to a bangbus x-video. I’d tap her.
—–
But anyways, I’ve always thought that college was unnecessary for about 80% of the people who attended. And even more unnecessary in todays world where knowledge is pretty much attainable with a few keyboard strokes.
Bardamu,
“We need a student loan jubilee to keep the angry, unemployed hordes from storming the Bastille and dragging the royalty to the guillotines.â€
Angry unemployed males aside, what effect would angry unemployd
slutschicks reallt have?Watch student protests happening now in Europe, and even in Tunisia, you will notice a good number of chicks. One chick in Tunisia was almost leading the protest.
it’s about owning debt. they had to come up with a new way to own you if you didn’t buy into bad credit, needlessly expensive SUV’s and/or houses. they wanted to get people in the hole even earlier. enter college and the tuition hike over the past decade for something worth less than it’s ever been worth historically.
it’s about owning the debt.
These are excerpts from the speech by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896. He dismissed both usurious banking and what became known later as “trickle down economics.”
“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
Never before in the history of this country has there been witnessed such a contest as that through which we have passed. Never before in the history of American politics has a great issue been fought out as this issue has been by the voters themselves.
It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defence of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.
We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!
The gentleman from Wisconsin has said he fears a Robespierre. My friend, in this land of the free you need fear no tyrant who will spring up from among the people. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of aggregated wealth.
We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe it is a part of sovereignty and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than can the power to make penal statutes or levy laws for taxation.”
“JUBILEE!”, followed by a return to sanity and proper law combined with the proper execution thereof!
While entertaining as Vengeance Theatre -
Expecting greedy, disenchanted cannon fodder
to do the work of Founding Fathers
only gets you the French Revolution.
Totally agree about almost everything you say about student loans etc. But where do rightists get off talking about leftist propaganda in the university? I’ll give you *feminist* propaganda, but that’s as far as it goes. I’ve been in universities since 2004 and never once had a single prof try to push leftist ideas onto me, though there are several who have espoused rightist ideas. I’m a pretty radical leftist but the biggest “propaganda” I’ve ever given to my students was in the form of subtle hints that they ought to think about going and voting, on various November 2′s. I’m scared that if I got any more political than that, somebody would get offended and talk to the chair. The “universities are liberal” thing is a TV Trope. Maybe it was accurate in the 60s or something but not any more.
(Oops, when I said “I’ll give you *feminist* propaganda, I meant I will *concede* that feminist propaganda exists. I personally would never spout that shit!)
While we’re on this topic, how about an overhaul of elementary and high schools where fluff courses are taught, with little reference to the real world?
A lot of these kids should have taken HAHAURFUCKED’s advice: get some vocational training and work a trade. Economically speaking, you’ll do better than those who go $150K in debt for barista degrees like sociology or women’s studies that they won’t be able to pay for because nobody wants to hire them.
But I guess some people care more about status than doing something useful for society.
I know more recently graduated friends who are working tables than I can count.
It is rough out there. Everyone thinks they deserve some kind of dream job where they can sit around and look cool or be in a management position. Everyone in college thinks that they are special. They all have failed to realize the importance of hard work and sacrifice.
The ones with the unreal amounts of college debt are the maddest of all. Thank God I graduate this May with no debt.
Some loudmouth said:
So, how about that guy in the second video who burned his worthless law degree and his worthless computer science degree. Oh yeah, he doesn’t exist in your dumb-as-rocks world.
P.S.: The median salary for an Electrical Engineer is about half of what skip claimed.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Electrical_Engineer/Salary
And that’s including people with 30+ years of experience. Something is going on with him and his salary that he hasn’t much bothered to mention.
In fact, adjusted for overtime, a normal electrical engineers wage is SLIGHTLY above that of many janitors.
Somewhat O/T but I only recently read your “manifesto” in which you explain the “in mala fide” thing.
It appears that Shakespeare wrote about somethign similar in “Romeo and Juliet.â€. Romeo wants to buy poison from a destitute apothecary. The apothecary hesitates to sell it, because it’s against the law. Romeo tell him:
“Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back;
The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.â€
University is still a decent idea if you’re picking up something useful, i.e. engineering and maybe some hard sciences. Other than that, unless you are literally in the 99th percentile of Law/MBA/Arts Undergrad, there is a high and increasing chance you will wind up burning your clown college degree for 10,000 views on YouTube. It’s a waste of your time and money.
Taking out student loans on the other hand, and starting a business, traveling, or spending it all on hookers and blow… that’s a smart move. The reality is that many, possibly most of the idiots taking out 200k to go to 3rd tier schools will never be able to pay them back. Some sort of amnesty is coming. If you’re 18 and your bank/government wants to throw money at you, take it. Buy experiences and real assets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage
kids with BAs have nothing much to complain about when compared to people who go to law school.
yikes
check out the guy(wallerstein) in the article and his dimwit of a girlfriend who doesn’t want him working big law although that’s the only way he will be able to pay those loans off.
*said using the biting voice of Roissy*
Wallerstein doesn’t mind the loans, he enoys the status that having a JD give him. He can one up his SWPL friends.
American colleges are typically located in small towns – they are islands of blue in seas of red. If college students started to “revolt” over tuition hikes in our current political climate, it wouldn’t surprise me if their
proletarianpetty bourgeois revolution ended up being put down by redneck Freikorps.The good news is, students under huge loan costs will be able to transfer their debt burden only baby boomers.
How?
Because baby boomers, starting from 2015 or so, will need to sell their houses in order to retire.
But who can buy these houses? All the new young people who would have been first time buyers are already $100K in debt. Their purchase of a first-time home is delayed by years.
Thus, too many boomers will want to sell, and far too few first-time buyers in a position to buy, will be ready. Home prices will keep falling, and baby boomers will have no new equity.
The millions of Mexican immigrants may not have debt, but don’t make enough to buy the more expensive homes either.
So the baby boomers have been robbed by the student loan debt bubble, more so than the current students themselves (who still have a long life ahead of them).
The only easy way out is to grant greencards to about 10M SKILLED, LEGAL immigrants (engineers, doctors, etc.). Most would be from China and India. But this is politically unfeasible too. I also don’t want irresponsible debt-takers to be rescued off the backs of hard-working skilled immigrants.
The baby boomers are doomed. They just don’t know it yet.
*ONTO baby boomers.
The student debt that today’s kids have taken on replaces the mortgage debt that they instead would have taken on, thus leaving baby boomers with no one to sell to at retirement, and thus lower prices and no home equity.
I keep hearing that ‘engineering’ and ‘hard sciences’ are worthwhile degrees, which is also horseshit. Engineering is like law right now. In fact, that there are so many lawyers ready to sue means most firms will only take ‘established’ engineers. If you are just getting out of school with an engineering degree (unless it’s EE or some theoretical/computer field) you aren’t getting a job actually building shit. You will be waiting tables next to your law degree holding friends.
CS/EE are less spotty but still spotty enough. Most people who come out of those fields would have gotten into low or mid-tier IT jobs as their foot in the door. Those jobs are essentially gone in most big cities. From as near as I can tell every single low level IT guy on the East Coast USA is an Indian.
Some people get recruited as programmers righ out of college if that is their discipline for a decent wage, but there are so many people coming out of college with CS degrees right now it’s a total crapshoot.
The financial angle isn’t the only issue either. The entire society of credentialism we have that is driving this bubble isn’t something that is going to go away with a jubilee. We are engaging in a stratification of society along cognitive lines, with distince class markers, and distinct political ideologies.
“redneck Freikorps”
ROFL! That made my day!
“[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier - ed.]”
I don’t understand. So there was one dead French nobleman who made notable contributions to science and law but who gained his wealth via winning the sperm lottery and being, ” . . . an investor and administrator of the “Ferme Générale” a private tax collection company; chairman of the board of the Discount Bank (later the Banque de France); and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic administrative councils,” which allowed him to finance his studies. Okay.
What does this reference mean in the context of your post? How many thousands (or more?) of French peasants with similar levels of potential in all kinds of fields, such as art, literature, natural philosophy, etc. etc. etc. died and will never be known because they were unable to develop their potential abilities due to effects stemming from the then ruling aristocracy’s hundreds of years of excesses based on abuse of the peasantry? Is the execution of a nobleman who made notable advances in several fields before being killed on trumped up charges during a period of massive upheaval caused by the actions of generations of his fellow sperm lottery winners supposed to negate the natural reaction such repression generates among the masses?
Or am I reading this editorial insertion wrong? I’ve been known to screw up before so maybe I’m doing it again.
Look, so far as I am concerned this is a survival situation. The US governing class has absolutely no concern for the majority of the native population, as evidenced at least by their continual permitting of massive amounts legal and illegal immigration which functionally drive down average wage levels in all sectors of the economy (from illegal fruit pickers to the legal Indian “IT Mafia” – ask anyone in IT about it if you’ve never heard the term) or the outsourcing of every possible kind of unskilled or skilled educated labor, such as legal and engineering work, to anywhere but the US. This will end in bloodshed sooner or later, and I want no part in it on either side.
Given these circumstances, why would any rational native born citizen be loyal to the US? Loyalty without reciprocity is self-imposed slavery.
As some blogger once noted regarding the pick-up scene, there are only two fundamental questions to any situation: (1) why should I care? , and (2) what’s in it for me? Regarding the US’ future, as far as I can see the answers are I shouldn’t and nothing. So fuck it. Let it all burn so long as I can profit from the fire and avoid getting burned.
Like Schiff explained, I’m gone with my useful and strategically-chosen education and experience ASAP and more than happy to skip out on any debt I might owe to anyone in power in this country. Why would I hold myself to a higher moral standard than the ruling class? That would be irrational.
I had another old post on this very subject. It explains how the zero-sum world view creates and fosters such morons.
Time for me to write another part for that series.
—
Pushy Parents and Zero Sum Cultures: 1
http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/pushy-parents-and-zero-sum-cultures-1/
You’ll only see sporadic, feeble “protests” by today’s college students.
Even 1968 era Hippies with 3oz of weed and 5 downers in their bloodstream – and weighed down with ten lbs of “love beads” -
have proven themselves as more devoted adherents to a cause than today’s narcissistic, corrupt, illiterate children.
They’re brainwashed and useless.
These kids have been sold a false bill of goods.However I wouldnt worry about them storming the Bastille any more than I would expect them to qualify for and join the Rangers.Remember those pathetic protestors at NYU(?) two years who were outraged that riot police invaded a “students only”zone?!
Neither should bail them out for their stupid decisions ,one can feel for the engineering, law(ok not so much),finance and medicine students apart from others other with useful skills who cant find a job.
But the large chunk are English,history,philosophy and similar jobs for who job hunting was always a nighmare even in a booming economy.I cant believe someone would go into debt to study a discipline that only yields the slightest possibility that they would find a job that gets them debt free in less than 10 years!
Have you read the latest by Dalrymple on the Tunisian riots
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0111td.html
No policy could be more dangerous, more certain ultimately to produce a social explosion, than to educate young people for many years and deny them first the opportunity to earn a living that they believe is commensurate with their education, and then the opportunity to earn a living at all. But this is the policy that many countries persist in following on both sides of the Mediterranean.
A poignant warning of what may come ahead in America as well.
What is wrong with trade schools? After all people need plumbers ,electricians, carpenters,pest control,lock smiths and so on.These pay just as well as the average “”white collar” job if not greater.I think the problem is America is becoming more and more class conscious and such jobs are regarded as dirty.There was a time when the more egalitarian minded in my native rigidly class conscious India would admire those American CEOs who would clean their own bathrooms ,wash their own cars ,mow their lawns and make their own coffee.Alas, that is no longer the case.With cheap Mexican labor,university education, a sense of entitlement for “proper jobs and an increasingly status conscious service based society(Karl Rove said in 2007 “I dont want my son to pick tomatoes”,would say Eisenhower had said such a thing?GW Bush for all his flaws actually worked on an oil rig) no corporate higher up takes any pride in manual labor.
{ 5 trackbacks }