Often in this society, when a scam is exposed, one must peel it layer by layer like an onion to reveal the stinky green, tear-inducing nubbin at the core. This week\u2019s lesson in \u201cHow We Get Screwed Everywhere We Turn\u201d finds us confronting the sticky wicket of student loan debt, and the problem some people have with the idea that other people might get something that helps them.<\/p>\n
This is the deal as I have always been given to understand it: If you can, you excel at school. You nail the grades and the extracurriculars, assembling a dossier of achievement that makes you attractive to superior institutions of higher education. If you can, you attend one of those schools, paying for it with scholarships if available or with student loans if possible. Like as not, you accrue debt, but this is done on the promise that the education and training you receive will avail you the kind of future employment whose financial compensation makes such debt endurable.<\/p>\n
Thus, the cynic in me is forced to note, are you inducted into The American Way: Your salary provides you with purchasing power that entire industries (maybe even the one you work for!) cater to. You buy a house and staple yourself to a mortgage, you buy cars and furniture and vacations, you have children of your own and aim them toward a future that is now your past \u2026 all because you volunteered to lock yourself into a debt cycle that bought the education which provides you with the salary required to participate in that American Way.<\/p>\n
\u2026 and it can be utterly insidious, how it all goes sideways sometimes. Take my friend the lawyer, for example. She aced her way through high school and got into a top-tier college. She aced college, with the sole exception of an ill-advised foray into the arcane brain cramp of organic chemistry. She wanted to go to law school because she wanted to serve the greater good, and because of her superior grades, she was invited to attend one of the best law schools on the Eastern seaboard.<\/p>\n
By the time she was finished with college and law school, my friend the newly minted lawyer had a pile of student debt on her back large enough to enjoy its own gravity. The advocacy groups, the public defender\u2019s office, all the places she wanted to apply her talents and intentions, paid far too little for her to be able to manage her debt, and so she wound up at a desk by the window of a glass-and-steel cage 30 stories above downtown, another associate \u201cgrinder\u201d at another corporate law firm.<\/p>\n
Want to know why corporations always seem to win? That\u2019s why. My friend the lawyer, who wanted to save the world, took a job in corporate law \u201cjust for a few years,\u201d she said at the time, until her six-figure debt was paid off. Like so many who came before her, the talents she brought to the table became another tool corporate America uses to maintain its supremacy by way of the courts. She dared to start a family and buy a house, and the siren song of that salary drowned out all the earlier aspirations that buried her in debt to begin with. It is an old story, all too often repeated.<\/p>\n
There you have it. How do you get the smartest students in the country to work defending the rights and power of corporations? Bury them in debt and then lure them into six-figure careers \u2013 perhaps a partnership, or even a judge\u2019s robe down the road \u2013 spent defending those corporations in court. So long as these students are shackled to debt, torrents of them will be available to make sure oil companies will never know a reckoning for, for example, turning the Gulf of Mexico into a death zone. This frees up money for the corporations to buy politicians who bring things like Citizens United<\/em> to life, and the wheel goes round.<\/p>\n