From Mark, in Occupy Detroit:
Is it an exaggeration to say America is returning to indentured servitude?
Student loan debt has exceeded $1 trillion for the first time. Yes,
TRILLION. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards,
reports the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. Department of
Education and private sources. Like colonial indentured servitude, the
student-loan contract is virtually unbreakable. In the U.S., student
loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and, unlike most other forms of
debt, student debt is almost never forgiven in personal bankruptcy. By
comparison, Finland, Brazil, and Chile remain tuition free, and France,
Germany, Austria, Iran and Denmark remain minimal compared with American
tuition and fees. Add to this a weak job market, where graduation does
not guarantee full-time employment. Even if the financial benefits of
higher education are more than the debt accrued for it, the subduing
effects of that debt still exist. In a vicious cycle, studen debt has a
subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more
likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.
(source: Get Up, Stand Up, by Bruce E. Levine, published 2011).
"It's going to create a generation of wage slavery," says Nick Pardini, a
Villanova University graduate student in finance who has warned on a
blog for investors that student loans are the next credit bubble — with
borrowers, rather than lenders, as the losers. (source: USA Today,
October 25, 2011)
In other related news, state troopers are
knocking on your neighbor's door and taking them away in handcuffs for
not paying a small $280 medical bill. Not in America, you say? Think
again. Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more
than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't
pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit
card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use
publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to
pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the
AP. How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She
didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant
was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was
told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the
bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state
troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs."
(source: Yahoo! Finance, April 23, 2012)
