Earlier today I attended a graduation ceremony at a highly respected private college. As with almost everything I do or think about these days, when I sat and looked around me, I started to get anxious and angry.
Here were hundreds of highly motivated and dedicated young men and women who had worked hard, put in the time and did what they were supposed to d0….they fulfilled their part of the bargain. So is their country able to fulfill its end of the bargain? Well, USA Today reports our country is prepared to offer them the highest unemployment rates for graduates since 1970…the first time such figures were reported. It’s a sickening situation and I see nothing on the horizon that suggests its improving in the least bit.
I got even more angry when the dean began his remarks with a rendition of facts that I find quite troubling….the fact that America has fallen from a country that actually manufactured and produced goods to a country that produces nothing and merely consumes services and goods made elsewhere. I guess from the perspective of an egg headed intellectual (with a guaranteed lifetime job through tenure) he doesn’t share the same concerns I and many other Americans share about our economy…he’s protected high up in his ivory tower. But as I looked around, I saw more than a few hard boned and warm blooded American fathers and grandfathers who were clearly not so enamored of our service-based economy.
Let’s deconstruct this a little bit. In the grandfather’s generation the American mind was the best and brightest on the planet. He used that mind to conceive of and then build with his own hands the machines and goods that saved the world and which propelled this country to unthinkable wealth and prosperity. In our father’s time, we got lazy and our leadership was shortsighted and corrupted. We continued to use our minds to conceive of great technologies and products but we no longer recognized the need to produce those goods ourselves or respected the work of those whose calloused hands produced them, but at least we took some steps to protect the intellectual property and keep the work product stateside. So what’s happened since then? Well, in a dramatically accelerated way, we no longer even keep the intellectual property or work product stateside…we just plain ship the technology, the intellectual property, the know how offshore and let other countries profit from the intellect and brain power that we developed over generations.
The thousands of parents and grandparents of all these newly minted graduates paid millions of dollars for the degrees celebrated today, but will the graduates ever be able to pay those debts back? Put in a different way…
HOW CAN WE MAKE STUDENT LOAN PAYMENTS IN THE USA IF WE DON’T MAKE ANYTHING ELSE HERE?
I remember having similar feelings in 2004 when my younger son, graduating cum laude from a top 20 law school was treated to–get this–the ACLU top management attorney welcoming the grads to a club. No mention of duty to provide services to those in need, to uphold the constitution, to work to prevent injustice. Welcome to the club of law grads, in which the top of the class, like my son, had an entitlement to a starting salary of $90,000.00+ signing bonuses to work for corporations. I stopped contributing to the ACLU. If its managing lawyer had nothing more to say than welcome to an exclusive group of people entitled to earn lots of money without mentioning the duties and obligations of those who have law degrees to serve the public, what is the ACLU saying. It had just obtained enormous contributions post-patriot act. There was a audience of bright young minds who would remember their graduation address for the rest of their lives. “Welcome to the club?” Where do we think that the due process violating corporate lawyers came from? The club. My son is now earning $180,000.00 to do securities work for a large firm. He still is committed to service, but has no time to do it. Billable hours, you know. And every large law firm I know has taken a bit of money from the fraudsters to conflict the firms with the resources to do so out of defending the citizens in this crisis. I was a new mother of my first born when I graduated from law school in 1975. I missed graduation from a top 20 law school to sleep in for the first time for 18 months. But I do remember the solemn oath administered by the Supreme Court on the day of my bar admission: to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which still rings in my ears daily. As Groucho Marx said, “I would not join any club that would have me for a member.”
I am the loyal opposition to any attack on the United States Constitution. Doesn’t that quaint old document say something about due process of law. I guess the judges who are robo-signing foreclosures didn’t take the same oath I did. Or maybe they heard someone welcome them to “the club.”