note: my RP by comment is still going and open for two more players. see this post.
Debt is a motherfucker. Our society is usurious as all hell, stealing from the education system to leave people innumerate and cutting so much slack to “legitimate” businesses that they all degenerate into con jobs and pyramid schemes, abusing people’s lack of savvy to run up egregious debts on them, run them ragged for life on the debt treadmill. It’s not sustainable; the subprime mortgage scandal was caused by lending imprudently, the idea you could keep the bullshit rolling on stone blood forever.
I myself was a victim of “legitimate” businesses selling debt on lies. It was student debt, racked up to obscene amounts through interest I was never ever going to be able to pay off. While Shitler and his Shitbirds have taken a wrecking ball to student loan forgiveness and income-based repayment programs, as of this moment, my own forgiveness is still safe because it was part of a court case against various for-profit schools that used misleading material to make us think employment was much more certain and would be much more well-compensated than it actually was. I’ve got some kind of long-term deferral waiting for the forgiveness to be processed. Thank fuck, and here’s hoping there doesn’t come an executive order to overturn that court case as part of the Arbeit Macht Frei Act of 2027, to pump up the population of debtor’s prisons.
Many other USians are not so lucky, having been all lined up to get their debts forgiven under Biden policies that were hammered by conservative assholes. Even a fucking three year old knows that “no backsies’ is sacred. Don’t tell us we’re getting loans forgiven and then renege. That’s injustice, motherfuckers. Anyway, the latest evil evil fuckshit to come from on high is that any student loans in default are being sent to collection agencies.
Have you heard of collection agencies, or are you from one of the hell countries where these things are real? A business that is incentivized to keep you from paying as long as possible while also abusing you into paying as much as possible, created this creepy system where they make feinting attempts to notify you of the debt for a while, shots across the bow, while running up whatever they thought would be a cool interest rate. Then they start the harassment, the repossessions, the wage garnishments.
Considering the staggering size student loan debts can run to, this is a recipe for hounding people to suicide or homelessness or other terrible situations and harms. These motherfuckers are ghouls. They live in golden palaces and sleep in the down of sacrificial doves, but it’s not enough. The view from heaven only satisfies if they are looking down on eternal torment in hell.
I am bothered by this because of the certainty that my own loan forgiveness is in their sights, that they’re going to kill it the second they can come up with a way to do so. But much more than that, I am bothered on behalf of the people who are suffering through this policy right now. It’s like, I’d be bothered if I might get shot, but not nearly as much as seeing someone else shot in front of me. That’s how I feel about the victims of this policy.
I had some chipper motherfucker tell me once that Biden’s loan forgiveness programs were buying votes. Well, who makes for a better world, somebody who buys votes by making lives better or someone who buys votes by making lives end? But this is what ameriKKKa wanted. Torment. Hell. Because it’s always gonna be someone else’s suffering right? Never you, no sirree.
It’s cool to see people show up big for protests, but I know those are the people who voted. And all the bitches who sat it out, they’re driving by oblivious. Get out of the way, you old hippies with your illegible handmade signs. I need to get to my third job to toil away the rest of my life because doncha know both sides are exactly the same and things couldn’t possibly be worse under the one the nazis liked so much.
Feeling tired. Anyway, Shitler keeps making regular people into desperate motherfuckers with nothing to lose, which is exactly the kind of people he needs to be fearing. I’m glad the fear centers of his brain seem to have been replaced with aluminum amyloids and jelly beans. I’m glad he won’t see it coming, because it’ll be more likely to land next time.
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Sure. Let’s go with that. Dems buy votes by occasionally doing a limited version of what every politician should be doing full-time: standing up for the constituents they represent in the government. And these latter day fake conservatives* stand up for the tiny, very wealthy constituency they’ve chosen in order to get massive campaign donations. Which they use to buy enough ads to craft a fake world around voters that makes less sense than Wonderland.
* I think a lot of the MAGA politicians and others who say they’re conservatives now are actually a kind of accelerationist. Only they don’t think that people will fight at the end. Instead they envision a world where most of us are too desperately busy keeping our heads above water to put up any meaningful resistance. Personally I hope we never find out which brand of accelerationist is right.
Ahh, the subprime mortgage crisis, a.k.a. ‘let’s create a bubble that will massively explode the moment housing prices stop increasing fast enough’. We didn’t get hit quite so badly by that in Canada (of course we did still get hit by it because a lot of the known-to-be-tarnished debt had been sliced up, hidden, and sold off piecemeal to other people who took the hit) because we had rules regarding approval of subprime mortgages and those rules were actually enforced. In the U.S., on the other hand, the people bending if not breaking even the more lax rules there were often getting rewarded because they were bringing in new customers/money sources, and the people who were actually being reasonable were the ones not getting performance bonuses.
(My father used to work for CIBC; we had a nice long discussion about this at one point. Having bankers in the immediate family meant I was taught a certain amount of financial literacy at a very early age. That said, the province of B.C. also had a required ‘Consumer’s Education’ course that was taught in high school, meaning there was a formal class on how cheques and credit cards worked.)
One of my friends from University had to go through bankruptcy and a debt management program, mostly thanks to student loans. I ended up getting involved because I was also technically his landlord at the time, and so I wrote out and signed a document saying that I was reducing his rent payment to a specific amount that he could then take to the agency he was working with to get approval for the management plan they were working on.
This is one of those cases where the situation in Canada is ‘better than in the U.S., but that’s not a high bar and we’re nowhere near as much better as we should be’.
And poised to get either a little bit worse under Carney, or (7% chance according to 338) a lot worse under Oilievre. :/
(I am, obviously, now able to get this article to load properly.)
lanir & jenora – good comments, true shit. j – it’s a bummer to hear about other countries having student loan debt. education should be free or at worst affordable. what a damn world.
beks – that’s because there’s an article to load now, instead of a title and two short notes to myself, heh.
@Bekenstein Bound:
Yeah, my thoughts on Carney are much the same as my thoughts on Tory as mayor of Toronto: “This is not someone who will work to make things better. This is, however, someone who will at least not actively work to make things worse, and sometimes that’s the best that we can get.”
@Bébé Mélange:
Yes, student loan debt is a thing up here as well, even if, again, not as bad a thing as it is in the U.S. It’s a thing for at least some of the same reasons as in the U.S. (Universities increasingly being run like profit-making corporations rather than educational institutions) but at least the ludicrous level of money shovelled into student sports to the level of the football coach being the highest-paid person at the University is not a thing up here.
It’s also mostly a thing of the last fifty years or so. When I and my friend attended University back in the late 1980s, it was a thing but the idea of student loan bankruptcy being common was unheard of. (My friend was just in the unfortunate situation of not being able to get any work in his field for several years after graduating.) And so far as I know we still allow discharging student loan debts via bankruptcy.
I didn’t have student loans myself, but that was mostly a matter of a couple of scholarships and a co-op education program where I alternated between study terms and work terms, allowing me to earn money during my University years. That meant a four year program took five years to complete.