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Student Debt Slavery: the Ruling Class’s Latest Shackles on Workers

by Dylan Borne

“I am a 60 year old mom and I work as a janitor to help my son pay his student loans. I have arthritis which makes my job even harder.”

A woman named Darlene posted this on studentdebtcrisis.org. She’s one of the 44 million Americans carrying crushing student debt. In the past decade, student debt rose to the highest it’s ever been. Now more than $1.4 trillion, it has overtaken auto loan, home equity, and even credit card debt. The average student graduates from college with $35,000 to repay—and counting. In just three years, between 2010 and 2013, the number of “seriously delinquent” loans (loans too high to repay) doubled. Many indebted workers are college dropouts, pressured to go to college by the competitive economy but ending up even worse off than if they had never gone to school.

But lenders and college administrators are laughing their way to the bank. More loans mean more people paying for college, so colleges take advantage and raise tuition. High tuition means more students take out more loans. The cycle continues, stacking up to a debt mountain nearly the size of Texas’s economy.

Yet real wages and salaries are declining. The value of a college degree now is less than half its value than in the early 2000s, according to the Pew Research Center. Students will have to stop paying; the tower of debt will have to fall.

When this happens, the banks won’t suffer. Whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat in office, the government will bail them out like both Bush and Obama did during the mortgage crisis.

But a solution is possible.

The New Orleans Workers Group demands that the government bail out the people instead of the banks. Cancel student debt. The billionaire bankers can afford to downsize the mansions we bought for them with our interest payments.

College should be free for everyone—like it is in socialist countries like Cuba—so the student debt can’t be amassed in the first place. Banks should be replaced by People’s Banks, overseen by ordinary workers to give out low-interest loans based on helping people sustainably pay for what they need, instead of exploiting them for the bankers’ profit.

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Puerto Ricans Still Left in the Dark

By Ashlee Pintos

Beginning on September 22nd, 2017, a modern colony of the “greatest country in the world” went into complete darkness. The small island of Puerto Rico with its 3.4 million citizens suffered in isolation while Hurricane Maria ravaged the entire country. It was not until day 4 or 5 that the millions of anxious Puerto Ricans living in the states were able to hear any information about their loved ones.

The government has declared only 48 deaths as direct results of the hurricane. However, The U.S. is only counting deaths directly related to the storm itself and does not address the hundreds of deaths caused by the failure of the U.S. government to help the island during Maria’s aftermath. There have actually been reports of over 450 deaths, island wide, with 69 people reported missing. Many of the island’s hospitals are not functioning at full capacity: they are running out of medications and fuel for their generators. This has resulted in hundreds of deaths from a lack of medication, oxygen tanks, and the sanitation that electricity provides to prevent the spread of disease. Relief resources are not being distributed to the island’s remote villages. Instead, the U.S. immediately began the militarization of the island, sending in hundreds of police and military officials.

After almost 2 weeks, Trump finally visited the capital of San Juan, the epicenter of the tourism industry and site of his own personal investments. He has not addressed the villages where dead bodies of humans and livestock have yet to be moved, there is no running water or electricity, and people are desperate for food, clean water, cash, and gasoline. One of his first responses to this catastrophic event was to acknowledge the island’s illegitimate debt of $74 billion and remark that the island is throwing the “budget out of whack.” But that debt has been caused by over 100 years of abuse by the U.S., and compared to state debts such as New York at $143 billion, Puerto Rico’s debt is manageable. Not to mention, the U.S. military budget is well over $800 billion, a figure that could pay PR’s debt 10 times over. Puerto Rico’s debt should be pardoned and the island should be granted liberation!