Matt Taibbi’s article on student loan debt that appears in this month’s edition of Rolling Stone is a Must Read for anyone who cares about what’s going so horribly wrong in this nation. Taibbi is about the only journalist who’s still reporting on the financial crimes, the fraud, the conspiracy and the corruption that are the defining characteristics of this epoch in our nation’s history.
I continue to use the word Fascism to describe what America circa 2013 has become. No, Virginia, America is not a Democracy or a Republic for that matter….Amerika is a fascist plutocracy….and the student loan scam is a perfect reflection of this undeniable fact.
First, understand that Fascism in its expanded sense refers to the fusing together of government and corporate interest such that the power and control of government is manipulated to serve the corporate interest, as opposed to the personal interest. (Do you see the conflict between a nation that is supposed to be grounded on personal interest/personal liberty instead bent and twisted to serve an entirely different and contradictory purpose?)
Of course we see Fascism coursing through the nation’s entire financial system….no punishment for the gross and systemic crimes of the corporate titans, but increasingly harsh and punitive punishments for all those who are the victims of a banking, financial and corporate sector gone completely out of control. Everyday banks send teams of attorneys into courtrooms all across this country using forged, fabricated and fraudulent documents to conclude the mock presentation of a civil trial, the predicate to punitive action taken against the defendants named in millions of lawsuits all across the country.
What would happen to a consumer that faced a judge who knew that consumer had forged his wife’s name on a mortgage in order to take out a few hundred thousand dollars?
Of course, what you’re probably thinking is…..”Well, of course the judge would just think, “Well, I’m sure the wife would have wanted it this way…after all she did benefit from it…so let’s not call what the husband did fraud or forgery, let’s call it something else….how about, “surrogate signing”. Right…that has a nice ring to it. The husband didn’t forge the signature on the mortgage, he was merely the surrogate signer for his wife….move along….nothing to see here.”
Right. Not exactly. And yet this is precisely what has occurred across the nation’s legal landscape….and entire decade of forgery, fraud, blatant consumer abuses……all sanctioned not just by the court system (I don’t say “our” court system anymore…after all…our language should reflect reality…the nation’s court system is owned by, “them”.)
Thanks to forged documents, banks can’t prove that they own trillions of dollars in mortgages, according to recently unsealed court documents relating to a lawsuit the government decided to settle out of court for $95 million in 2012. The evidence gathered by Lynn Szymoniak, a Florida resident who fought off a wrongful foreclosure after three years of legal wrangling, could invalidate ownership claims to the homes in question. Yet foreclosures based on these documents continue to be approved.
Sorry, I did veer of the subject topic a little bit there, but let’s get right back in and understand the dangerous set of circumstances that are now set up all across this country when millions of our nation’s youth (and their parents) have been sold into economic slavery based on contracts that can be enforced in the most punitive and aggressive fashion. First, most student loan debt contracts begin when the student is just barely legal age to enter into such a contract….and surely unable to understand the full impact of the contract she’s signing. Next, and most importantly, that student loan contract is just one half of a much larger and far more significant contract….
When a student signs a student loan contract she does so with the expectation that the other parties to that contract are acting in good faith.
And this is where it all breaks down. Those millions of Americans that have been sold into debt slavery have been sold into this slavery by a government that works not to ensure the larger protection of their interests…and those of society as a whole…no, the interest served by her government is to concentrate wealth into the hands of an ever smaller percentage of the population, and even to sacrifice her own personal and national interest in the service of foreign interests…as when jobs, industries, entire regions are sold off to foreign corporations and governments. Next, or at the same time, the debts and the obligations of these same regions, industries, populations are sold off entirely.
The contract is broken because she’s entered into a system that was broken long before she took out the debt…broken purposefully and broken with malice, corruption and intent. The student was promised, most from birth,
“Work hard, study long, you will be rewarded with promise, opportunity and the chance to build upon that which your foreparents gave you.”
Why did they neglect to tell her, at anywhere along the way that the jobs she needs to fulfill her obligations had been sold off, chopped up and decimated decades before? And because they failed to share that vital information with her, was there not serious fraud in the inducement right from the start of the student loan contract?
So How Exactly is The Student Loan Problem Fascism? Ain’t It Just Good Old Fashioned Capitalism?
No. And let me explain why. What not many Amerikans understand (yet), is that student loan debt has been turned into SUPER DEBT….In many ways it’s much like the only other kind of SUPER DEBT, IRS liens and debt. Here’s why….Student loan debt is sold off to collection companies, that are essentially the deputized mafioso of the federal government. The debt collectors that have been put into partnership with the federal government have far greater powers and tools at their disposal to hound, harass and punish those who cannot pay their debt than virtually any other kind of debt collector operating in this country….listen to Senator Elizabeth Warren explain it…
[advanced-iframe securitykey=”a89b984039fb3b09578b3059dd44d761a319ccc0″ src=”https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815″ width=”1000″]“Student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious” is how Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it. Collectors can garnish everything from wages to tax returns to Social Security payments to, yes, disability checks. Debtors can also be barred from the military, lose professional licenses and suffer other consequences no private lender could possibly throw at a borrower.
