Meh. As a late (1958) Boomer, I grow tired of articles whining about generational differences. We all want to live comfortably and see our children do better than we did.
What I do see as a crime against the current 18 to 30 generation was feeding them the BS that the only way to get ahead is by being indoctrinated (rather than educat…
Meh. As a late (1958) Boomer, I grow tired of articles whining about generational differences. We all want to live comfortably and see our children do better than we did.
What I do see as a crime against the current 18 to 30 generation was feeding them the BS that the only way to get ahead is by being indoctrinated (rather than educated) at college and to voluntarily take on debt along the way. Then, we add insult to injury by telling them that they really don't need to honor their promises and can instead foist their obligations onto those of us who paid our debts or the 60% of Americans who did not attend college, but did not voluntarily take on the debts of deadbeats. I cannot think of a worse set of values to instill in our young.
Neoliberalism ensured that the empty, hollow, meaningless posturing of corrupt educational bureaucrats would be exploited to screw over college students and society in general, on the assumption that college bureaucracies would stay the same as they were after WW2 when the great expansion of education happened.
In reality the growth model of conveyor-belt education was in crisis by the early 1970s (Eric Weinstein), and the only thing that has been done since then is to add layer after layer of band-aids to a gaping, gangrenous wound.
The public and legislatures that fund public higher education prefer their delusions to reality.
Fixing (burning down dysfunctional educational administration) education is too hard, and frankly above the pay grade of most of the political elites. They are completely incompetent.
Perhaps Charles the reason we fed them the BS to become 'indoctrinated' is because we who went to university forty to fifty years ago actually had a worthwhile experience and learned things, especially other viewpoints and ways of thinking.
I think it has come as a surprise to millions of Americans these past number of years to see how our university system has been so cowed to a uniformity of thought, to censorship of the outlier and the free thinker, and the acceptance and even the elevation of the mediocre in talent and excellence.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has had a huge influence, no doubt about that. But it's worthwhile to note that far left progressivism has been around for decades, usually outside the Democratic Party, and always lurking around campuses, inculcating. I think at around the time of the Occupy movement and in earlier manifestations of anti corporate activism in the late '90s, this brand of a Far Left was slowly incorporated in the Democratic Party, helped along by, of course, Bernie Sanders.
A so called Big Tent party, mainstream Dems thought they could control it all - but wrong they were (not unlike the GOP and the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus..).
So to be clear, you are blaming the "progressive wing of the Democratic Party" for the totalitarianism, intellectual fraudulence and Orwellian conformity that is inherent to the "woke" faux religion?
Not corrupt media-tech oligarchs, not the global financiers that fund the "progressives"? Not the unholy alliance of the Democratic party with the military-industrial-complex?
I'm not saying they weren't funded. Of course they were and still are. But there has to be a movement to fund first. Intellectual fraudulence is putting it mildly, it goes hand in hand with the conformity you mention. Totally in agreement there - since it all leads to the consensual censorship on campus faculties and student bodies alike, which is where this conversation first started.
And I did say influence - the 'blame' can go to the larger modern progressive movement that's been around for at least forty years, and in my opinion largely outside the Democratic Party for the most part, until now.
Re the military industrial complex, I think both parties have enjoyed the mutual trough feeding experience enough to be equally culpable from the heady days of Truman.
Libertarians were stabbed in the back over and over and over for decades by corrupt "right wing" neolib/neocon billionaire think tanks (some of which were CIA "controlled opposition").
The Koch Bros created the "movement" per se, but it drew from long simmering populist resentment going back to neoconfederate subculture, and marginalized border reivers and celts at least 500 years ago.
And, Charles, as a GenX, I get tired of being ignored. Umm, hello? There’s a bunch of 40/50 somethings that can’t get power away from the old farts either. Most GenX are tough, no bs, call it like we see it. We were latchkey kids and were out at night with no phones.
Though a boomer, I agree with you PH. Gen X has been given short shrift. Perhaps they’re uniquely positioned to guide the country forward, sandwiched between two self-important generations.
People were told that a disaster had started. They (mostly) ignored the warnings, instead listening to utter frauds like Reagan and Clintons-Obama and now Biden the senile buffoon (who the elites look like they are going to dump, soon, and replace with a more credible puppet).
If wresting power away from the old farts is your game, then have you tried working campaigns and getting involved in primary elections? Have you lobbied your state leaders for change? My boys are 39 and 36 - both always vote and my youngest has attended Lobby Day at the Virginia House of Delegates with me. Because I don't know you, I'm not including you when I say that too many complain about who's in charge, but can't be bothered to get involved or even vote.
That's a bingo! I thought so. I have a book of collected Bloom County comics and Bill the cat always has a rough go of it. Those comics are incredibly well done.
Yup, sure have. I worked Election Day for a city council candidate, who lost. Been to a couple of fundraisers for local candidates. Written many letters over the years too. Nothing changed.
The thing about us Gen-Xers is that we learned early in life that the Boomers had spoiled everything before we had a chance to get to it. The behavior of the Boomers led to societal changes that hit us long before they ever hit the Millennials. We--not the Millennials--were the first generation that had it worse than our parents did.
As a consequence, I think many of us have been resigned to political helplessness for a long time. There just aren't enough of us for anyone to care about our votes. And most of us have been struggling too hard to put food on the table to expend energy on a fight that we are unlikely to win.
... one day I was sitting in a meeting about how to make the world work better — actually it was a meeting about how the new global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization, is likely to make the world work worse. The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside. “This is a HUGE NEW SYSTEM people are inventing!” I said to myself. “They haven’t the SLIGHTEST IDEA how this complex structure will behave,” myself said back to me. “It’s almost certainly an example of cranking the system in the wrong direction — it’s aimed at growth, growth at any price!! And the control measures these nice, liberal folks are talking about to combat it — small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops — are PUNY!!!”
Suddenly, without quite knowing what was happening, I got up, marched to the flip chart, tossed over to a clean page, and wrote:
Bad social science. Boomers were subjected to well understood social conditioning, just as you were.
The "behavior" of Boomers was shaped by their conditioning, and by social, economic and technological disruption.
The "sense making" system that had been put in place prior to the 60s/WW2 failed.
A few people on the social margins understood that there were deep problems that the system could not correct, but everything was buried under an increasing avalanche of bullshit that wasn't accounted for.
You are trying to blame the 99% for the bullshit that the 1% did.
You yourself are a perfect example of the mode of failure that is the cause of the problems.
I don't see much evidence that you have even the beginning of any awareness of the 75-100 years of research and commentary that exists that attempts to understand the problem at the deeper levels.
Celia, I'm curious what you think was taken from you. My 39 year old worked his way through college to become an electrical contractor and has a 4 bedroom house in a gated community. My 36 year old used his G.I. Bill to help pay for his Criminal Justice degree from GMU and he too has a 4 bedroom house (though not in a gated community). Both of them earned what they have faster than I did.
My husband and I are both 56. His father was a country veterinarian. Mine was a union steel worker. We both had middle-class lifestyles growing up.
We ourselves have spent all our adult lives in the working poor class until recently, and we're still not quite middle-class. Well-paying jobs have always been difficult to find. Returning to college and finishing our degrees in our 30s did not change anything...except saddling us with outrageous levels of student debt.
Celia, I am sorry that things have not gone well for you. I was taking college courses with University of Maryland, Asian Division on Okinawa, but I decided that my true love is software development, so I dropped out of college and started taking training courses in programming to get certified by IBM and later by Microsoft. It turns out that certs are of far greater value than a degree in the software world.
When I retired from the Marine Corps as a Gunnery Sergeant and became a professional software developer I instantly doubled my pay and it went up from there. I was fortunate enough to choose a profession that I loved and still make good money. After 23 years on active duty and another 23 years of writing code, I finally retired last year.
I will not tell you that it was all bad choices on your part because luck definitely has something to do with it. I made good choices, I moved where the money is, and I worked hard for it, but I also know that I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and lucky that my true love also pays well. Many people follow their hearts as I did and work hard at what they love, but consequently live in near poverty for the privilege of doing what they love. My wife had a Masters in counselling and she made a third of what I did and it took us 20 years to pay off her loans.
I will however say that I do not see how your prosperity was stolen from you by my generation when opportunities abound even today. Companies are complaining that they cannot find enough qualified workers and these are largely not low paying jobs. My boys are not yet making what I did at my height, but they are both on track to exceed me before they retire.
I see no evidence that you are capable of understanding the problem beyond a ridiculously shallow level (same as most Boomers).
That is the real problem.
You are (apparently) clueless, just as most of them were clueless.
There were all sorts of people in both the WW2 and Boomer generation that warned about problems (some long before the 1960s), but the masses didn't care, the "system" didn't care, etc.
Some of that was that "Manufacturing Consent" (Chomsky) and the creation of controlled opposition on both the "right" and "left".
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
Ok, so your low IQ and/or ADD/ADHD is natural, and not induced by physical trauma, alcoholism, drug use, etc.
Your gross stupidity is very evident. The forum is not "democratic", no one votes for how it is governed. It is owned by Bari Weiss and operated by her support team (whoever they are) as far as I can tell.
The Forum owner establishes some form of "free speech", within the overall TOS of substack. I'm not aware of any discussion or explanation of what Weiss or her team's actal, specific positions are on "free speech" in the comments.
There are several hyper toxic, ignorant, reactionary trolls that constantly post meaningless mental sewage in the comments that I would vote to ban given that substack does not have a ignore/mute button that non-admins can use.
While populism is currently being blasphemed it has always served as course correction. And while we historically have embraced a two-party system the parties themselves have changed. Personally I like to think this is what is occurring now. Wishful thinking no doubt but a girl's gotta dream.
I do not exist in the metaworld nor will I ever do so. I am very firmly grounded. It does explain your, er, well let's just say speech pattern. Well that and being a left coast hippie functionary. I don't think our mentalities are compatible so see no point in further discourse.
People were told that a disaster had started. They (mostly) ignored the warnings, instead listening to utter frauds like Reagan and Clintons-Obama and now Biden the senile buffoon (who the elites look like they are going to dump, soon, and replace with a more credible puppet).
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but Robert Heinlein once said that of course the game is rigged, but you stand no chance at all if you don't play the game. Nothing will change if we all just sit around and snivel about it.
So you're going to sit around like an asshole and play silly, self-referential word games to satisfy your pathetic, disgusting need for ego gratification?
The ancient Israelites would beg to differ, and would have forgiven everyone's debt (not just students) across the board every 49 years, known as a jubilee. Regardless, the student debtors are just as much victims of this racket as the taxpayers are. Especially if they went to public colleges and universities, that really should have been free or at least affordable all along (like it was for most Boomers, and still is in some countries to this day).
Free for Boomers? Where? This Boomer worked minimum age, walked miles to and from work, saved enough money to attend college and did. Nothing was handed to me. It is maddening to be blamed for the woes of the state of the country. Not everyone grew up like a Kennedy.
News flash: in a civilized society, we all subsidize each other to one degree or another throughout the lifecycle. That's exactly why K-12 is free to students and paid for by taxpayers, so why not college as well? And we all benefit from a more educated population. Other countries understand that, and yet a subset of Americans have a king-sized chip on their shoulders about that for some reason.
You have a point - on the top of your head! Why not free grad school, medical school, law school or dental school? How far do we go in subsidizing the elite educated class? And for those of us who paid for our own education, then paid for our children's education, we are now asked to pay for everyone's education. When you get something for free, you value it less. Work for anything and you value it more. It was your limited time, part of your one and only life, that went into getting what you bought for yourself. That is how you make better decisions - when you have your own skin in the game.
"You have a point - on the top of your head! Why not free grad school, medical school, law school or dental school?"
You are SO CLOSE to actually getting the point! If med school was free, doctors would no longer have to graduate in ludicrous debt, and thus wouldn't have to pass the costs down in the form of higher fees for service (i.e. medical bills). Ditto for dentists, lawyers, etc.
The rest of what you say is simply a relative and subjective value judgment.
News flash: if the schools actually educated, I might agree with you. Unfortunately, colleges and universities today are cranking out poorly educated, but highly indoctrinated drains on society.
School choice and investing in charter schools would go a long ways towards correcting the failings of K-12. Only funding higher education's STEM curriculums with taxpayer money would be a far better return on our investment. Squishy curriculums should be forced to survive based on the value placed on them by the idle wealthy.
I think the debt the ancient Israelites is far different than debt today. I think today's debt stems from failure to appreciate how destructive spiritually debt can be. And it is true that education costs were less for Boomers although I don't know if that is true once adjusted for inflation. What I do know is that if we do not reckon with debt, personally and as a nation, and get our monetary policy under control a lot of dystopian science fiction is going to come true.
You are correct that it is different today. The debt racket is actually WORSE and even more usurious than it was back then. So a jubilee would apply *a fortiori* to the modern day.
How do you feel about the proposed debt forgiveness in SF, coupled with a lump sum payment and annual payments for more years than any of us will live? How do you feel about the US defaulting on that $32 trillion debt?
I actually have no problem with it, despite not having any dog directly the fight as I currently have no debt of my own. But the massive debt overhang weighs down the entire economy, so actually we all have a dog in this fight.
If Wall Street gets bailed out, so too should We the People. It's only fair.
As for defaulting on the debt, as the Donald famously said in 2016, you never have to worry about the federal government defaulting on the debt, since you can just print the money. Yes, he actually said that, and he's not wrong, even though I can't stand him myself.
I pay my bills so think others should as well. The federal debt is a time bomb that the electorate really.
needs to educate itself about. I am not a fan of Wall Street. Or bailouts of industry. Too big to fail makes a mockery of us all. Federal monetary is a joke and has been for over a century now.
It’s very handy to cite as an example Ancient Israelites and their debt forgiveness, and you’re not wrong. But if you’ve looked lately most students are taught to hate Israel.
Israel is festering cesspool of psychotic warmongers of the kind that Jeremiah warned about. You don't even follow your own religion, which isn't a surprise.
Did ancient Israelites college education include $18M per year for wages and benefits paid to DEI staff? As a Boomer, we didn't have DEI staff, luxury housing, haute cuisine, state of the art recreation facilities, multi-million dollar athletic stadiums... All of these amenities are required post-Boomer and have absolutely nothing to do with a college education.
100% and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference so those whiny self-indulgent b****** need to step up to the plate or the whole world's going to go down the drain.😉
I would ask who is in power and position to make the sweeping changes? Who are those in power? Who are those hiring the DEI ...hell, who came up with the whole philosophy in the first place? and also the other Army of administrators? I think the answer in all of these questions including who created a financial aid guaranteed by the government would be the Boomer generation.
College was affordable when students had to work hard to gain admission, did not want to pay for elaborate perks or gourmet cafeteria food or luxury apartments instead of dorm rooms. I took out loans, worked a co-op job, sought out scholarships, and valued my hard-earned degrees. So did prospective employers who needed the skills I acquired.
College was affordable before legislatures drastically reduced funding under the influence of neoliberal economics (which Carter cracked the door to, and which Reagan then threw the door open to, followed by Clintons-Obama-Biden).
Bloated education administration was driven by the availability of funny money, which was a product of neoliberalism.
The Jubilee reference is a bit of a cherry pick but I will agree that the cost of college for this generation compared to previous generations is outrageous and is the direct result of Boomers not having anything better to do then rape and pillage... Boomers in this context are the over-educated egg heads and Pampered, spoiled brats that hung around at rock concerts dropped acid and ran to Canada during a war instead of as the author points out growing up and getting serious themselves.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
I am a Boomer and I do not know ONE who engaged in that behavior. The ones you describe are the ones who begat the current generation. SBFs parents for example. I am guessing you can find a lot of them at Sta-a-a-hnford. They really need to learn how to cast an educated ballot.
Frank, the increase in cost is directly due to the government guaranteeing loans beginning in 2010. Also, while colleges and universities used to be comprised of about 10% administrative staff, instructors and professors are now outnumbered by administrative staff.
Yes, the vast majority of Boomers tried acid, but then we grew up and very few went to Canada. The vast majority of the 59,000 American that died in Vietnam were Boomers who answered their country's call to fight in a war instigated and lead by what we now call The Greatest Generation. In short, they stepped up.
College students (and, more importantly, their parents who are largely paying the bills) demand more things which are expensive to provide. When I went to college we had a very basic gym and a choice of three fairly crappy meals in the dining hall. Today, students demand student centers with olympic pools, the latest fitness equipment, multiple dining options (vegan, vegetarian, paleo, and every kind of ethnic food under the sun). Also, my college had a psychologist on-call for emergencies but now all colleges have full-time counseling centers.
Dorm rooms used to just be cinderblocks with a bed and desk. Now they have internet, cable TV, full kitchens on each floor, etc.
It's not just student loans driving up the costs, but a desire for a more upscale experience. And the sad thing to me, when I went to visit my alma mater, was that, on Friday night, everyone was just sitting in their rooms watching streaming videos or texting vs. socializing and forming the connections that will be able to help and support them in adulthood.
Charles you are correct that the endless streams of government liquidity make it possible to increase cost exponentially. I would argue that your next point is precisely why those costs increased. The over-educated Boomer elite who were tired of dropping acid and indeed did grow up and go to school needed jobs and so therefore they created an elaborate administrative system for themselves. This General pattern of the boomer generation raping and pillaging as I said can be found in every field of endeavor especially in the financialization of everything in this country and in the west. You are correct that the call was answered by the boomer generation as well as the entire country being built in the factories of the boomer generation however I am careful to differentiate the over-educated elite of the East and West Coast with the remainder of Boomers who have held this country together with their blood and sweat... And yes many times my comments are hyperbolic ..
To Ajax: yes the rate at which college has become unattainable is insane, and this needs to be addressed prior to forgiving all debt. But free? To quote “The Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
College is no longer affordable because the federal government took over guaranteeing student loans, thus incentivizing raising prices at several times the rate of inflation. OTOH, while government does enforce taxation at gunpoint, nobody put a gun to those students' heads - their debt was voluntary.
wrong, as usual. a massive brainwashing campaign took place by higher education.
obama took advantage of the paradigm shift toward "diversity" to rewarm cultural-leftism and make it seem inevitable that "success" in improving socioeconomic status was dependent on college.
obama was able to turn the college loan system into a tax that fed big money to the federal govt at a time that Republicans in Congress would not agree to increase taxes.
obama stabbed the working classes in the back (same as clintons). no surprise.
Their debt was voluntary, I agree. As such, students should have been given back the right to go bankrupt and in turn have the ability to negotiate their debt - like all consumers and companies.
Have you ever seriously studied the Bible, all 66 books, written by various authors down through millennia? It’s filled with every kind of literary form; prose, poetry, wisdom, law, prophecy, song, history, to name a few. It has every type of literary device; chiasm, alliteration, acrostic, allusion, anthropomorphism, hyperbole, idiom, metonymy, paradox, I could go on but the list is very long. It’s embedded with science, archeology, geography, astronomy, etc.
So well done you if you have such great insight that trumps thousands of scholars down through the ages who’ve studied it, that you can be so dismissive of this book that tells of the human story.
By the way, since we as humans live our lives based on stories told, what story do you have to replace the, in your opinion, “fictional” Bible?
you are severely delusional and apparently don't understand much about "science".
ancient mythic cultures didn't have much science.
the most scientific-rational cultures had strong traditions that rejected, for at least short periods of time, the superstitions in the Bible and other mythic texts/traditions.
the Enlightenment (1700s, classical liberalism) is rooted more in "pagan" rationalism than superstitious texts from the middle east.
RT, I have no more love of the banking system than you do. Wilson should have been hung for what he did to this country. OTOH, the federal government began guaranteeing student loans in 2010 and regardless of how much interest the banks have collected over the years, it means that all loans guaranteed by the government that are defaulted on, or forgiven, will be paid off by the taxpayer. This is unfair to those of us who paid our loans and even more unfair to the 60% of Americans who never voluntarily entered into student debt in the first place.
I feel this. I’m 51 and still paying off student loan debt. It’s the compound interest that gets people. Paying interest on interest when your loans are in forbearance almost guarantees you’ll never get them paid off.
Meh. As a late (1958) Boomer, I grow tired of articles whining about generational differences. We all want to live comfortably and see our children do better than we did.
What I do see as a crime against the current 18 to 30 generation was feeding them the BS that the only way to get ahead is by being indoctrinated (rather than educated) at college and to voluntarily take on debt along the way. Then, we add insult to injury by telling them that they really don't need to honor their promises and can instead foist their obligations onto those of us who paid our debts or the 60% of Americans who did not attend college, but did not voluntarily take on the debts of deadbeats. I cannot think of a worse set of values to instill in our young.
Neoliberalism ensured that the empty, hollow, meaningless posturing of corrupt educational bureaucrats would be exploited to screw over college students and society in general, on the assumption that college bureaucracies would stay the same as they were after WW2 when the great expansion of education happened.
In reality the growth model of conveyor-belt education was in crisis by the early 1970s (Eric Weinstein), and the only thing that has been done since then is to add layer after layer of band-aids to a gaping, gangrenous wound.
The public and legislatures that fund public higher education prefer their delusions to reality.
Fixing (burning down dysfunctional educational administration) education is too hard, and frankly above the pay grade of most of the political elites. They are completely incompetent.
Education policy is political quicksand.
Perhaps Charles the reason we fed them the BS to become 'indoctrinated' is because we who went to university forty to fifty years ago actually had a worthwhile experience and learned things, especially other viewpoints and ways of thinking.
I think it has come as a surprise to millions of Americans these past number of years to see how our university system has been so cowed to a uniformity of thought, to censorship of the outlier and the free thinker, and the acceptance and even the elevation of the mediocre in talent and excellence.
I agree. But, as you are on the other side on the other side of the political divide, how do you think that happened?
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has had a huge influence, no doubt about that. But it's worthwhile to note that far left progressivism has been around for decades, usually outside the Democratic Party, and always lurking around campuses, inculcating. I think at around the time of the Occupy movement and in earlier manifestations of anti corporate activism in the late '90s, this brand of a Far Left was slowly incorporated in the Democratic Party, helped along by, of course, Bernie Sanders.
A so called Big Tent party, mainstream Dems thought they could control it all - but wrong they were (not unlike the GOP and the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus..).
Just my opinion..
I value your opinion.
And I value yours..
So to be clear, you are blaming the "progressive wing of the Democratic Party" for the totalitarianism, intellectual fraudulence and Orwellian conformity that is inherent to the "woke" faux religion?
Not corrupt media-tech oligarchs, not the global financiers that fund the "progressives"? Not the unholy alliance of the Democratic party with the military-industrial-complex?
lololololol
I'm not saying they weren't funded. Of course they were and still are. But there has to be a movement to fund first. Intellectual fraudulence is putting it mildly, it goes hand in hand with the conformity you mention. Totally in agreement there - since it all leads to the consensual censorship on campus faculties and student bodies alike, which is where this conversation first started.
And I did say influence - the 'blame' can go to the larger modern progressive movement that's been around for at least forty years, and in my opinion largely outside the Democratic Party for the most part, until now.
Re the military industrial complex, I think both parties have enjoyed the mutual trough feeding experience enough to be equally culpable from the heady days of Truman.
The Tea Parties were originally PURE ASTROTURF.
Torched by political napalm.
Libertarians were stabbed in the back over and over and over for decades by corrupt "right wing" neolib/neocon billionaire think tanks (some of which were CIA "controlled opposition").
The Koch Bros created the "movement" per se, but it drew from long simmering populist resentment going back to neoconfederate subculture, and marginalized border reivers and celts at least 500 years ago.
web search: "colin woodard 11 nations dna"
Fellow '58 here. The college thing is my biggest regret. Well actually public school and the college thing. I was hoidwinked.
So your thinking has been flawed for a long time.
😴
And, Charles, as a GenX, I get tired of being ignored. Umm, hello? There’s a bunch of 40/50 somethings that can’t get power away from the old farts either. Most GenX are tough, no bs, call it like we see it. We were latchkey kids and were out at night with no phones.
Though a boomer, I agree with you PH. Gen X has been given short shrift. Perhaps they’re uniquely positioned to guide the country forward, sandwiched between two self-important generations.
1992. Ross Perot. "Giant sucking sound".
People were told that a disaster had started. They (mostly) ignored the warnings, instead listening to utter frauds like Reagan and Clintons-Obama and now Biden the senile buffoon (who the elites look like they are going to dump, soon, and replace with a more credible puppet).
If wresting power away from the old farts is your game, then have you tried working campaigns and getting involved in primary elections? Have you lobbied your state leaders for change? My boys are 39 and 36 - both always vote and my youngest has attended Lobby Day at the Virginia House of Delegates with me. Because I don't know you, I'm not including you when I say that too many complain about who's in charge, but can't be bothered to get involved or even vote.
Off topic, but I love your profile pic! I'm about 90% sure I know exactly where it comes from and I love that comic.
Thank you! Bill the Cat first from Bloom County and later from Outland. :-)
That's a bingo! I thought so. I have a book of collected Bloom County comics and Bill the cat always has a rough go of it. Those comics are incredibly well done.
Yup, sure have. I worked Election Day for a city council candidate, who lost. Been to a couple of fundraisers for local candidates. Written many letters over the years too. Nothing changed.
The thing about us Gen-Xers is that we learned early in life that the Boomers had spoiled everything before we had a chance to get to it. The behavior of the Boomers led to societal changes that hit us long before they ever hit the Millennials. We--not the Millennials--were the first generation that had it worse than our parents did.
As a consequence, I think many of us have been resigned to political helplessness for a long time. There just aren't enough of us for anyone to care about our votes. And most of us have been struggling too hard to put food on the table to expend energy on a fight that we are unlikely to win.
A classic from systems theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points
(early 1990s)
excerpt:
... one day I was sitting in a meeting about how to make the world work better — actually it was a meeting about how the new global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization, is likely to make the world work worse. The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside. “This is a HUGE NEW SYSTEM people are inventing!” I said to myself. “They haven’t the SLIGHTEST IDEA how this complex structure will behave,” myself said back to me. “It’s almost certainly an example of cranking the system in the wrong direction — it’s aimed at growth, growth at any price!! And the control measures these nice, liberal folks are talking about to combat it — small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops — are PUNY!!!”
Suddenly, without quite knowing what was happening, I got up, marched to the flip chart, tossed over to a clean page, and wrote:
PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Regulating negative feedback loops.
7. Driving positive feedback loops.
6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).
3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.
Everyone in the meeting blinked in surprise, including me. “That’s brilliant!” someone breathed. “Huh?” said someone else.
I realized that I had a lot of explaining to do.
...
re: helplessness
See Rabbi Michael Lerner's book "Surplus Powerlessness" (1980s) for example.
https://www.amazon.com/Surplus-Powerlessness-Psychodynamics-Psychology-Transformation/dp/1573922994
Bad social science. Boomers were subjected to well understood social conditioning, just as you were.
The "behavior" of Boomers was shaped by their conditioning, and by social, economic and technological disruption.
The "sense making" system that had been put in place prior to the 60s/WW2 failed.
A few people on the social margins understood that there were deep problems that the system could not correct, but everything was buried under an increasing avalanche of bullshit that wasn't accounted for.
You are trying to blame the 99% for the bullshit that the 1% did.
You yourself are a perfect example of the mode of failure that is the cause of the problems.
I don't see much evidence that you have even the beginning of any awareness of the 75-100 years of research and commentary that exists that attempts to understand the problem at the deeper levels.
We are too busy working lol. Someone has to
Celia, I'm curious what you think was taken from you. My 39 year old worked his way through college to become an electrical contractor and has a 4 bedroom house in a gated community. My 36 year old used his G.I. Bill to help pay for his Criminal Justice degree from GMU and he too has a 4 bedroom house (though not in a gated community). Both of them earned what they have faster than I did.
bloated ego gratification. asshole.
[replying to:
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11984287
]
My husband and I are both 56. His father was a country veterinarian. Mine was a union steel worker. We both had middle-class lifestyles growing up.
We ourselves have spent all our adult lives in the working poor class until recently, and we're still not quite middle-class. Well-paying jobs have always been difficult to find. Returning to college and finishing our degrees in our 30s did not change anything...except saddling us with outrageous levels of student debt.
Celia, I am sorry that things have not gone well for you. I was taking college courses with University of Maryland, Asian Division on Okinawa, but I decided that my true love is software development, so I dropped out of college and started taking training courses in programming to get certified by IBM and later by Microsoft. It turns out that certs are of far greater value than a degree in the software world.
When I retired from the Marine Corps as a Gunnery Sergeant and became a professional software developer I instantly doubled my pay and it went up from there. I was fortunate enough to choose a profession that I loved and still make good money. After 23 years on active duty and another 23 years of writing code, I finally retired last year.
I will not tell you that it was all bad choices on your part because luck definitely has something to do with it. I made good choices, I moved where the money is, and I worked hard for it, but I also know that I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and lucky that my true love also pays well. Many people follow their hearts as I did and work hard at what they love, but consequently live in near poverty for the privilege of doing what they love. My wife had a Masters in counselling and she made a third of what I did and it took us 20 years to pay off her loans.
I will however say that I do not see how your prosperity was stolen from you by my generation when opportunities abound even today. Companies are complaining that they cannot find enough qualified workers and these are largely not low paying jobs. My boys are not yet making what I did at my height, but they are both on track to exceed me before they retire.
Well said!
mindless, reactionary narcissism
reeks of irrelevant narcissism
I see no evidence that you are capable of understanding the problem beyond a ridiculously shallow level (same as most Boomers).
That is the real problem.
You are (apparently) clueless, just as most of them were clueless.
There were all sorts of people in both the WW2 and Boomer generation that warned about problems (some long before the 1960s), but the masses didn't care, the "system" didn't care, etc.
Some of that was that "Manufacturing Consent" (Chomsky) and the creation of controlled opposition on both the "right" and "left".
Here is an example:
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
God you are long winded!
POOPERZ
Don't you need to go back to the Alex Jones troll farm and start plotting the next terrorist attack on election officials?
https://www.newsweek.com/solomon-pena-new-mexico-shootings-gop-candidate-election-denial-1774323
A long winded asshole.
POOPERZ
Don't you need to go back to the Alex Jones troll farm and start plotting the next terrorist attack on election officials?
https://www.newsweek.com/solomon-pena-new-mexico-shootings-gop-candidate-election-denial-1774323
brain dead reactionary buffoon
Pretty sure I couldn't type if I was brain dead. Reactionary? Yes, to your buffoonery.
POOPERZ
Don't you need to go back to the Alex Jones troll farm and start plotting the next terrorist attack on election officials?
https://www.newsweek.com/solomon-pena-new-mexico-shootings-gop-candidate-election-denial-1774323
All you do is name call. It's unbecoming and infantile. Go beat sand.
It is a figure of speech, MORON.
You are a REACTIONARY to anything that contradicts your infantile confirmation biases and emotive narratives.
In other words, you are a mirror image of the retarded "woke" left.
Do you have brain damage???
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11989022
No just zero patience for your waffling, however, I do realize the forum is Democratic and you have your rights to be on the site.
POOPERZ
Don't you need to go back to the Alex Jones troll farm and start plotting the next terrorist attack on election officials?
https://www.newsweek.com/solomon-pena-new-mexico-shootings-gop-candidate-election-denial-1774323
Ok, so your low IQ and/or ADD/ADHD is natural, and not induced by physical trauma, alcoholism, drug use, etc.
Your gross stupidity is very evident. The forum is not "democratic", no one votes for how it is governed. It is owned by Bari Weiss and operated by her support team (whoever they are) as far as I can tell.
The Forum owner establishes some form of "free speech", within the overall TOS of substack. I'm not aware of any discussion or explanation of what Weiss or her team's actal, specific positions are on "free speech" in the comments.
There are several hyper toxic, ignorant, reactionary trolls that constantly post meaningless mental sewage in the comments that I would vote to ban given that substack does not have a ignore/mute button that non-admins can use.
-----
replying to:
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11996565
💯
While populism is currently being blasphemed it has always served as course correction. And while we historically have embraced a two-party system the parties themselves have changed. Personally I like to think this is what is occurring now. Wishful thinking no doubt but a girl's gotta dream.
the nation state system is disintegrating because it is not anti-fragile to disruption.
the parties are useless puppets.
cultural evolution (developing anti-fragility) will make most of the existing system irrelevant over the next several generations.
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
I do not exist in the metaworld nor will I ever do so. I am very firmly grounded. It does explain your, er, well let's just say speech pattern. Well that and being a left coast hippie functionary. I don't think our mentalities are compatible so see no point in further discourse.
1992. Ross Perot. "Giant sucking sound".
People were told that a disaster had started. They (mostly) ignored the warnings, instead listening to utter frauds like Reagan and Clintons-Obama and now Biden the senile buffoon (who the elites look like they are going to dump, soon, and replace with a more credible puppet).
you are still at a psychotic, paranoid and ignorant dead end dingbat.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol26/iss1/4/
😴
The ACTUAL PROBLEM is that you are unable to escape from your echo chamber.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol26/iss1/4/
excerpt:
Dr. Martin van Creveld is a professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from the
London School of Economics and has been a Fellow of War Studies at Kings College, Cambridge. During the 1991-
92 school year, he taught at the US Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. He is the author
of many books, including Fighting Power: German and U.S. Performance, 1939-1945; Technology and War;
Command in War; Supplying War; The Training of Officers: From Military Professionalism to Irrelevance; The
Transformation of War; Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict; and Air Power and Maneuver Warfare
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but Robert Heinlein once said that of course the game is rigged, but you stand no chance at all if you don't play the game. Nothing will change if we all just sit around and snivel about it.
meaningless blather. you are the problem. you can't see outside your echo chamber, thus you don't believe that there is anything outside of it.
So you're just going to sit around and snivel about it?
So you're going to sit around like an asshole and play silly, self-referential word games to satisfy your pathetic, disgusting need for ego gratification?
more meaningless blather.
Yup, a sniveler.
thread origin
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11972804
you seem to have an endless supply of mental sewage that you project into the comments section.
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11984759
thread origin
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/11972804
Charles, I think Heinlein would have called e.pierce a "self-panicker". ;)
"David" would have been called an asshole that licks other assholes that are shitting mental sewage in his face.
TROLL
The ancient Israelites would beg to differ, and would have forgiven everyone's debt (not just students) across the board every 49 years, known as a jubilee. Regardless, the student debtors are just as much victims of this racket as the taxpayers are. Especially if they went to public colleges and universities, that really should have been free or at least affordable all along (like it was for most Boomers, and still is in some countries to this day).
Free for Boomers? Where? This Boomer worked minimum age, walked miles to and from work, saved enough money to attend college and did. Nothing was handed to me. It is maddening to be blamed for the woes of the state of the country. Not everyone grew up like a Kennedy.
Damn right.
Amen, sister.
CUNY schools were free until the 1970s, and SUNY schools were not free, but were much cheaper even after after adjusting for inflation.
No school is free. Someone had to pay for it and I'm betting that it wasn't the people who benefitted from it.
News flash: in a civilized society, we all subsidize each other to one degree or another throughout the lifecycle. That's exactly why K-12 is free to students and paid for by taxpayers, so why not college as well? And we all benefit from a more educated population. Other countries understand that, and yet a subset of Americans have a king-sized chip on their shoulders about that for some reason.
You have a point - on the top of your head! Why not free grad school, medical school, law school or dental school? How far do we go in subsidizing the elite educated class? And for those of us who paid for our own education, then paid for our children's education, we are now asked to pay for everyone's education. When you get something for free, you value it less. Work for anything and you value it more. It was your limited time, part of your one and only life, that went into getting what you bought for yourself. That is how you make better decisions - when you have your own skin in the game.
"You have a point - on the top of your head! Why not free grad school, medical school, law school or dental school?"
You are SO CLOSE to actually getting the point! If med school was free, doctors would no longer have to graduate in ludicrous debt, and thus wouldn't have to pass the costs down in the form of higher fees for service (i.e. medical bills). Ditto for dentists, lawyers, etc.
The rest of what you say is simply a relative and subjective value judgment.
News flash: if the schools actually educated, I might agree with you. Unfortunately, colleges and universities today are cranking out poorly educated, but highly indoctrinated drains on society.
One could say the same about K-12 as well. Regardless, we shouldn't throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
School choice and investing in charter schools would go a long ways towards correcting the failings of K-12. Only funding higher education's STEM curriculums with taxpayer money would be a far better return on our investment. Squishy curriculums should be forced to survive based on the value placed on them by the idle wealthy.
I think the debt the ancient Israelites is far different than debt today. I think today's debt stems from failure to appreciate how destructive spiritually debt can be. And it is true that education costs were less for Boomers although I don't know if that is true once adjusted for inflation. What I do know is that if we do not reckon with debt, personally and as a nation, and get our monetary policy under control a lot of dystopian science fiction is going to come true.
You are correct that it is different today. The debt racket is actually WORSE and even more usurious than it was back then. So a jubilee would apply *a fortiori* to the modern day.
How do you feel about the proposed debt forgiveness in SF, coupled with a lump sum payment and annual payments for more years than any of us will live? How do you feel about the US defaulting on that $32 trillion debt?
I actually have no problem with it, despite not having any dog directly the fight as I currently have no debt of my own. But the massive debt overhang weighs down the entire economy, so actually we all have a dog in this fight.
If Wall Street gets bailed out, so too should We the People. It's only fair.
As for defaulting on the debt, as the Donald famously said in 2016, you never have to worry about the federal government defaulting on the debt, since you can just print the money. Yes, he actually said that, and he's not wrong, even though I can't stand him myself.
(Mic drop).
I pay my bills so think others should as well. The federal debt is a time bomb that the electorate really.
needs to educate itself about. I am not a fan of Wall Street. Or bailouts of industry. Too big to fail makes a mockery of us all. Federal monetary is a joke and has been for over a century now.
It’s very handy to cite as an example Ancient Israelites and their debt forgiveness, and you’re not wrong. But if you’ve looked lately most students are taught to hate Israel.
Israel is festering cesspool of psychotic warmongers of the kind that Jeremiah warned about. You don't even follow your own religion, which isn't a surprise.
Nothing is ever “free”.
TANSTAAFL
Did ancient Israelites college education include $18M per year for wages and benefits paid to DEI staff? As a Boomer, we didn't have DEI staff, luxury housing, haute cuisine, state of the art recreation facilities, multi-million dollar athletic stadiums... All of these amenities are required post-Boomer and have absolutely nothing to do with a college education.
Either way, don't blame it on the students. They were not the ones who created this mess.
100% and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference so those whiny self-indulgent b****** need to step up to the plate or the whole world's going to go down the drain.😉
stupid
I would ask who is in power and position to make the sweeping changes? Who are those in power? Who are those hiring the DEI ...hell, who came up with the whole philosophy in the first place? and also the other Army of administrators? I think the answer in all of these questions including who created a financial aid guaranteed by the government would be the Boomer generation.
College was affordable when students had to work hard to gain admission, did not want to pay for elaborate perks or gourmet cafeteria food or luxury apartments instead of dorm rooms. I took out loans, worked a co-op job, sought out scholarships, and valued my hard-earned degrees. So did prospective employers who needed the skills I acquired.
College was affordable before legislatures drastically reduced funding under the influence of neoliberal economics (which Carter cracked the door to, and which Reagan then threw the door open to, followed by Clintons-Obama-Biden).
Bloated education administration was driven by the availability of funny money, which was a product of neoliberalism.
Ignorance, like your, is the real problem.
The Jubilee reference is a bit of a cherry pick but I will agree that the cost of college for this generation compared to previous generations is outrageous and is the direct result of Boomers not having anything better to do then rape and pillage... Boomers in this context are the over-educated egg heads and Pampered, spoiled brats that hung around at rock concerts dropped acid and ran to Canada during a war instead of as the author points out growing up and getting serious themselves.
1992. Ross Perot. "Giant sucking sound".
People were warned, they ignored the warning.
They were idiots then, just like you are an idiot now.
Brainwashed idiocy.
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
I am a Boomer and I do not know ONE who engaged in that behavior. The ones you describe are the ones who begat the current generation. SBFs parents for example. I am guessing you can find a lot of them at Sta-a-a-hnford. They really need to learn how to cast an educated ballot.
Frank, the increase in cost is directly due to the government guaranteeing loans beginning in 2010. Also, while colleges and universities used to be comprised of about 10% administrative staff, instructors and professors are now outnumbered by administrative staff.
Yes, the vast majority of Boomers tried acid, but then we grew up and very few went to Canada. The vast majority of the 59,000 American that died in Vietnam were Boomers who answered their country's call to fight in a war instigated and lead by what we now call The Greatest Generation. In short, they stepped up.
College students (and, more importantly, their parents who are largely paying the bills) demand more things which are expensive to provide. When I went to college we had a very basic gym and a choice of three fairly crappy meals in the dining hall. Today, students demand student centers with olympic pools, the latest fitness equipment, multiple dining options (vegan, vegetarian, paleo, and every kind of ethnic food under the sun). Also, my college had a psychologist on-call for emergencies but now all colleges have full-time counseling centers.
Dorm rooms used to just be cinderblocks with a bed and desk. Now they have internet, cable TV, full kitchens on each floor, etc.
It's not just student loans driving up the costs, but a desire for a more upscale experience. And the sad thing to me, when I went to visit my alma mater, was that, on Friday night, everyone was just sitting in their rooms watching streaming videos or texting vs. socializing and forming the connections that will be able to help and support them in adulthood.
Charles you are correct that the endless streams of government liquidity make it possible to increase cost exponentially. I would argue that your next point is precisely why those costs increased. The over-educated Boomer elite who were tired of dropping acid and indeed did grow up and go to school needed jobs and so therefore they created an elaborate administrative system for themselves. This General pattern of the boomer generation raping and pillaging as I said can be found in every field of endeavor especially in the financialization of everything in this country and in the west. You are correct that the call was answered by the boomer generation as well as the entire country being built in the factories of the boomer generation however I am careful to differentiate the over-educated elite of the East and West Coast with the remainder of Boomers who have held this country together with their blood and sweat... And yes many times my comments are hyperbolic ..
To Ajax: yes the rate at which college has become unattainable is insane, and this needs to be addressed prior to forgiving all debt. But free? To quote “The Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The rate needs to be accelerated so that nobody goes to college anymore.
College is no longer affordable because the federal government took over guaranteeing student loans, thus incentivizing raising prices at several times the rate of inflation. OTOH, while government does enforce taxation at gunpoint, nobody put a gun to those students' heads - their debt was voluntary.
wrong, as usual. a massive brainwashing campaign took place by higher education.
obama took advantage of the paradigm shift toward "diversity" to rewarm cultural-leftism and make it seem inevitable that "success" in improving socioeconomic status was dependent on college.
obama was able to turn the college loan system into a tax that fed big money to the federal govt at a time that Republicans in Congress would not agree to increase taxes.
obama stabbed the working classes in the back (same as clintons). no surprise.
Their debt was voluntary, I agree. As such, students should have been given back the right to go bankrupt and in turn have the ability to negotiate their debt - like all consumers and companies.
Have you ever seriously studied the Bible, all 66 books, written by various authors down through millennia? It’s filled with every kind of literary form; prose, poetry, wisdom, law, prophecy, song, history, to name a few. It has every type of literary device; chiasm, alliteration, acrostic, allusion, anthropomorphism, hyperbole, idiom, metonymy, paradox, I could go on but the list is very long. It’s embedded with science, archeology, geography, astronomy, etc.
So well done you if you have such great insight that trumps thousands of scholars down through the ages who’ve studied it, that you can be so dismissive of this book that tells of the human story.
By the way, since we as humans live our lives based on stories told, what story do you have to replace the, in your opinion, “fictional” Bible?
You admitted in a comment further down that you are just a troll. Yet you make idiotic comments about "serious" study of the bible? lolololololololol
you are severely delusional and apparently don't understand much about "science".
ancient mythic cultures didn't have much science.
the most scientific-rational cultures had strong traditions that rejected, for at least short periods of time, the superstitions in the Bible and other mythic texts/traditions.
the Enlightenment (1700s, classical liberalism) is rooted more in "pagan" rationalism than superstitious texts from the middle east.
RT, I have no more love of the banking system than you do. Wilson should have been hung for what he did to this country. OTOH, the federal government began guaranteeing student loans in 2010 and regardless of how much interest the banks have collected over the years, it means that all loans guaranteed by the government that are defaulted on, or forgiven, will be paid off by the taxpayer. This is unfair to those of us who paid our loans and even more unfair to the 60% of Americans who never voluntarily entered into student debt in the first place.
RT, I share your anger, but I don't think the government will default on it's loan guarantees.
I feel this. I’m 51 and still paying off student loan debt. It’s the compound interest that gets people. Paying interest on interest when your loans are in forbearance almost guarantees you’ll never get them paid off.