Greetings,
Biden scored another semi-victory by forgiving about half a trillion dollars in student loans, directly affecting about 43 million people. This is good and long overdue, but as with so many other things these days I just can’t get wholeheartedly behind it. This should be the minimum we expect from our government, not a grand achievement. It’s not a moment for celebration but a stark reminder of how broken our government is, and why.
50 years of conscious planning have brought us to where we are today. In the 1970’s, government of, by, and for the people was declared the enemy and Business, specifically lassiez-faire-capitalist Business, was ordained the cornerstone of America. Abandoning America’s founding principles couldn’t happen overnight, so the 1970’s saw the beginning of an infrastructure overhaul in media, law, ideology, education, and politics. Government, flawed protector of the people, would be transformed over 40 years into the docile servant of the Corporations.
This desecration required a voter base that wouldn’t (or couldn’t) look too closely. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ delivered people motivated by bigotry and scared by the political and economic realities of a changing world. The Unholy Alliance between the Political and Religious Right delivered congregations ready to unquestioningly take the word of Leaders, and Leaders ready to give the word of Corporatism. ‘Trickle Down’ economics gave a predatory, extractive economic system moral grounding… greed is good. Education and expertise became untrustworthy. A willfully blindable electorate was built and Reaganistic Corporatism took hold in the 80’s. Corporations became people, the politicians they bought decided their money was speech, and Corporate speech has drowned out human speech since then.
To be clear, the Republican Corporatists did all this before Trump. If Trump never existed, Republicans would still be handing out tax cuts for the rich, threatening the middle class, empowering corporations, and denying climate change as they’ve done for decades. They’re still trying to convince us trickle down works! Republicans had built an ideally pliable electorate and fed them with convenient propaganda, but they got overconfident by assuming the sludge pump only fit THEIR lies. Trump showed them it worked for ANY lies and he fed their pump with louder, longer, more lurid, and more naked, targeted, and ruthless lies than the Republicans themselves. He stole their electorate right out from under them.
Now, an anemic nice-guy Democrat with no discernable base of support fights two armies… one, a Corporate juggernaut on a decades-long campaign of using our own laws to create a permanent serfdom, the other, an upstart campaign that uses the ugliest parts of our history to bring the threat of an ethno-theocracy and actual Civil War. I guess I’m amazed he could get anything done at all, but my disappointment comes from realizing it’s just a juicier-than-usual table scrap. The Republicans are right that it’s a payoff to Biden’s base (which only benefitting Middle Class America by coincidence), because it’s a one-off, arbitrary, triage solution. The problem itself hasn’t changed. Student debt is exploding, strangling the ability of young (and increasingly older) people to participate in the economy in any long term, stable way.
Let’s imagine a government that wasn’t held hostage to Corporate power… what might it do? A patriot, some active citizen who actually read the Declaration and Constitution, might have noticed the parts that laid out the purpose of our government. Among other things, it explicitly says they’re supposed to “promote the general welfare”, enabling the “pursuit of happiness”. Nothing can be more patriotic than promoting (not tolerating, not monetizing, not politicizing) education. Possible solutions exist to fit every ideological niche, if that were the goal. Instead, the Corporatists favor turning schools into profit mills, the Trumpists favor denigrating education altogether, and the Dems favor table scraps. I just can’t feel good about being grateful, but maybe I can wash down the scraps with a little of the wealth that will be trickling our way… any day now.
Make a great day,
Digging Deeper…
Tom’s Tidbits- Trump will kill us now. CorpraDems will kill us later, Tom Dwyer Newsletter, Feb 2020
Table Scraps, Tom Dwyer Radio Spot (with video), YouTube, Aug 2011
Citizens United vs Citizens Human, Tom Dwyer Radio Spot (with video), YouTube, Dec 2010
Cults… So much more than an empty insult, Charles Letherwood in the Tom Dwyer Newsletter, May 2021
The Federalist Society, Charles Letherwood in the Tom Dwyer Newsletter, Feb 2019
Is it fair to forgive student loans? Examining 3 of the arguments of a heated debate, Scott Horsley on NPR, Aug 2022
Analysis: Biden’s student loan forgiveness may erase savings of climate, drugs law, David Lawder on Reuters, Aug 2022
Student Loan Debt Is an American Malignancy Born of Ronald Reagan, Thom Hartmann on Common Dreams, Aug 2022
A Personal Apology to Young Americans for Failing to Stop Ronald Reagan, Thom Hartmann on Common Dreams, Jul 2022
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Gilens and Page on Cambridge University Press, Sep 2014
Study: Politicians listen to rich people, not you, Andrew Prokop on Vox, Jan 2015
Four policies to help the middle class, and how to pay for them, Reeves and Guyot at Brookings.edu, Nov 2018
The Middle Class Grows the Economy, Not the Rich, David Madland at Center for American Progress, Dec 2011
Social status, political priorities and unequal representation, Traber et al, European Journal of Political Research, Apr 2021
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan, Aug 2008
Extremism expert Stephanie Foggett: How the far right is winning the “information war”, Chauncey DeVega on Salon, Aug 2022
The Questions We Must Be Asking About a Second American Civil War, Umair Haque on Common Dreams, Aug 2022
