Loans For College Collapse And Vanish

March 31, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Banks have ceased to lend money to students. Even with government guarantees. This will have a very vile ripple effect. Many colleges will go bankrupt this year if their incoming student body vanishes. Meanwhile, Congress will debate yet another $100 billion emergency spending bill for the hyper-expensive war in Iraq that is costing us trillions of dollars. Congress also must debate the 200 page reoranization bill handed over by the right wing neo cons who plan to destroy America. Anyone who OKs anything this gang does is insane or a traitor. Arrest the neo cons for wrecking our nation. Treason can be the charge.

US credit crunch hits education as banks abandon student loans

One of America’s leading banking associations has given warning that the United States faces a growing educational apartheid as some lenders withdraw from student loans amid new evidence that the credit crisis has spread across all types of borrowing.

In the past fortnight, some banks, including HSBC, have pulled out of the $85 billion (£42 billion) a year US student loans market, fuelling anxiety that the turmoil that hit debt markets on Wall Street last summer is spilling over into the wider economy and making credit more difficult to secure for ordinary American households.

In the US, many undergraduates take out a federal guaranteed loan and top up their financial needs with a private loan from lenders such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citi-group. In the academic year 2005-06, $17 billion in private student loans was used to finance higher education.

Banks have become reluctant to offer private student loans because worsening credit conditions have meant that they cannot package up the loans and sell them on.

All over the mainstream media, I read stories about the hopes of the investment community that the collapse of the US banking/economic system is finished and life will return to 'normal'. 'Normal' being 'continuous financial overruns, oceans of red ink' status quo normalcy. When any great economic system finally collapses, there is this raging desire to regain the worse aspects of the previous system. This desire is tremendously strong in empires. Since they are accustomed to ignoring reality, they figure, why not ignore it forever? In normal downturns, the investing classes constantly chatter about how things are turning around rapidly. When it takes longer than a year, they grow glum and then angry. But the first year of any collapse, they love to pretend this time will be short and the pain, a mere pin prick.

History, on the other hand, views this with her usual grim amusement and the picks up her bloody pen to scratch more painful news into the unscrolling parchment of Reality Biting. The news at the top of the story today infuriates me [how UNUSUAL!!! HEH.] Here we are, Congress is going to begin 'debating' the latest spending bill for IRAQ. The bill for this misbegotten, miserable war, is heading towards the trillions of dollars. The price of oil before this invasion was less than $50 a barrel. The collapse of our 'in the red' economy has gone off the cliff thanks to the high cost of oil and war spending. Every time Congress has to consider shutting the public purse to this wild, useless spending, they do the opposite.

They are afraid of being called 'traitors'. Well, I have something to say about that: they are ALL TRAITORS if they stupidly vote to keep on this useless, wild spending! Instead of educating our youth, we are spending hideous sums to kill Iraqis. Public education post high-school is now going to collapse due to the inability to spend public money on important things like the education of our youth. My own family is being hammered by this. The availability of government loans to students has collapsed in the last 7 years. As inflation has eaten away at these funds ability to cover 4 years of college, students had to go to banks for supplementary loans. Now, these are vanishing! Poof!

This directly hits my own children. Now, colleges will see registrations vanish next fall as even more students cannot get loans. This collapse is EASY TO FIX. All we have to do is have Congress decide to vote for the AMERICAN PEOPLE and FUND the education of OUR CHILDREN. And they can easily do this by cutting totally, every penny going to the misbegotten Iraq war! Sadr just called a ceasefire which was brokered by Iran. Iran has won this war. Iran can do what Iranians love to do: make fun of us as they chase us out of Shi'a lands. But what else do we expect? We want the Chinese chased out of Tibet, after all!

So we can go! Goodbye! The Shi'ites are perfectly capable of running their own affairs. Perhaps, if our collective brains kick in, we can realize doing business with the Persians has an upside: both we and they will do much better. Eh?

Instead, our educational system will now collapse. The loss of these loans will HAMMER our educational system ferociously. The wave of cut backs in colleges will be disastrous and deep. And what was all that garbage from those flat earth flat worms like Friedman and his six months, all will be well in Iraq?

Stomp on them! Feed them to robins. Robins came to my mountain looking for worms. I will send them to the New York Times to eat.

G7 to press big banks to reveal extent of credit crunch losses

The world’s big banks are to face stronger demands from finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven (G7) leading economies to declare the full scale of their exposure to losses from the US housing market slump and the global credit crunch.

The G7 move comes after the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), the policy group of leading economies’ finance ministries, regulators and central banks, said at the weekend that lack of clarity over the extent of banks’ losses is worsening the credit crunch.
*snip*
The warning from G7 meanwhile came as the Basle-based FSF finalised a report to G7 finance ministers on responding to the credit crisis, including recommendations for toughening regulation and scrutiny of financial institutions and markets.

The banking collapse continues. This isn't due to some small problem. It is a systematic failure that can't be fixed by some simple jiggering of interest rates. Since the ultimate reason is a lack of savings coupled with wild spending and irresponsible debt creation in order to fund imperial adventures, fixing this collapse is no easy thing. When banks issue too many debts to kings and emperors, when those guys default and they always do, the banking system collapses. From the earliest days in history to modern times, these collapses are as inevitable as the sun rising or setting.

This 'lack of clarity' isn't a symptom. It is a cause. And the way to tackle this issue is easy: you arrest the people who devised financial systems and instruments that are concealing the truth. We call people who make such things 'con men' or 'rip off artists.' And the sole reason for making anything impossible to trace, explain or understand is simple: it is to hide frauds. In the case of the explosion in new instruments that were made of bad debts, the opacity was to hide the TRUTH about the quality of these underlying loans. And the people engineering this knew this perfectly well. They thought, no one would figure out that these tricks we are playing have diluted the true value of these things we are selling.

Note that Goldman Sachs even boasted about betting that these instruments would fail even as they sold them to outsiders who had no idea that a ton of pure junk, utter garbage, had been parked inside of AAA rated instruments! So I say, arrest these guys. The top ones have many millions in profits from this fraud. Governments can use these profits to fund education for our youth.

Trichet, King May Support Fed as Ammunition Runs Low

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has so far shouldered most of the burden of saving the global economy and financial markets. He may be about to get more help.

With the credit crisis entering its ninth month, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet are on the verge of new steps to spur lending and increase liquidity, say economists at Lloyds TSB Group Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Interest-rate cuts may be next if the crisis persists.

``We're inching closer to the great global monetary easing,'' says Joachim Fels, co-chief economist at Morgan Stanley in London.

Lloyds predicts King's next step will be to accept more types of collateral for loans. Trichet will pump more money into banks, RBS forecasts. Such measures would take Europe's two biggest central banks further down the path laid out by Bernanke this month.

To save this corrupt banking/investing system set into motion by con artists, the central banks will now drop interest rates to 0%. But they will not be funding student's loans at that rate! Which is why I am calling for no loans but rather, GRANTS to our young people. Education is supposed to pull us out of our post-industrial wasteland and into intellectual pursuits. And note how this article talks about BERNANKE 'shouldering the burden.' This idiot isn't shouldering anything. He is imitating the Bank of Japan. Super-cheap loans to governments and exporters, no money for the working classes. Note that this hasn't helped the lower classes of Japan! And in the US, wages are dropping, access to higher education is being strangled, we have no idea how to deal with all this!

One thing is certain: imitating Japan will put the entire planet into a depression. As I often point out. Japan has the 0% regime, super-low import regime down pat. If everyone locks out the import of high-value materials like Japan has, we will have no world trade except in commodities. If that! But the G7 nations focus only on China with fatal results to world trade. Europe and Japan wanted the US to drop interest rates so America can buy more of their exports. The US can't afford to do this. In Japan, I read yesterday that a Japanese airline is going to start buying only planes from Mitsubishi who is going back into the business. Japan bought American and European planes for many years as a counterbalance to the car trade which is totally one way from Japan to the outside world.

Now that they rule the roost internationally, they are now going to rebuild their aviation industry. They US trade statistics with Japan would be near $0 going to Japan while Japan exports $30 billion to the US. We have to deal with this one-way trade just as we have to cease our imperial overreach and wasteful wars. Our G7 buddies want us to continue all this. They are our TRADE RIVALS and they are BEATING US UP.

Stock Markets Call Bluff of Asian `Decoupling': Andy Mukherjee

The four best-performing Asian markets have been Taiwan, Pakistan, Thailand and Sri Lanka, posting modest gains of between 2 percent and 8 percent in U.S. dollar terms.

Is this the Asian ``decoupling'' that global investors had so fondly hoped for? Weren't the larger and faster-growing economies of China and India supposed to shield investors from the mortgage- and credit-related financial crisis in the U.S.?
*snip*
The winners' story is much more remarkable, especially when you consider that the quarter began with a heightening of political risk in two out of these four markets and -- at least at the time -- a far-from-certain process of reduction of the same risk in the two remaining ones.

In other words, the biggest investing houses that fueled our financial collapse are STILL running after Miz Risky! Countries that are politically unstable, outright insurrections, even, are the 'best bets.' This is due to the higher interest rates for loans in these unstable places. So money is flowing there. Is this a good idea? Or total insanity? Obviously, anyone who screams, they want safety only to take the government-sponsored loans from the Fed Reserve window and then rush off to the most dangerous parts of the planet to watch it 'grow' is...insane.

Weird interest rates

Continuing the discussion about the weird (and worrying) state of the financial markets, here’s a picture showing just how strange things are. Normally, we just say that the Fed sets “short-term interest rates,” because all very short rates are about the same. Below is the Fed funds target rate and the one-month Treasury bill rate; they’ve always been right on top of each other.

Always, that is, until now. Treasury rates have plunged close to zero, even though Fed funds is still 2.25%. Since open-market operations take place in Treasuries, I take this to mean that the Fed may not actually be able to reduce short-term rates much from current levels — which means, in turn, that conventional monetary policy has been taken off the table. As Brad says, be afraid — be somewhat afraid.

All the charts and graphs show the same thing: off the cliff. This is scary. Because this is a sign we are going into a depression. Commodities shot up right before the Great Depression and the previous Long Depression. This is a symptom of an impending depression. Once the higher commodities eat up domestic budgets and industry struggles to pay for higher material costs by CUTTING LABOR just like they just did in Japan for 15 years, we get a dead market due to workers unable to buy anything but the barest necessities. Depressions are all about necessities. And as commerce ceases, the prices of commodities falls, of course.

As we are beginning to see, barely. The instability in the commodities markets is proof that the buying ability of billions of workers is now beginning to be sopped up and will end up eating up all the incomes of the mass of humanity. Then, money becomes precious since workers will be cut out of the money stream. money is wealth ONLY if it moves. This includes gold. If it sits in a vault or underground or in a deep cave under some Dragon, it is no longer wealth. It is a dead horde, a grave.

This process of defunding workers has been going on for a while. Workers in Asia have, outside of Japan, seen their finances going up and up. But now, all nations will see their workers lose ground. And the more they lose purchasing power, the more the depression will hammer world economies. 0% interest rates won't increase the buying power of workers seeing their wages collapse and jobs vanishing.

Long Fight Ahead for Treasury Blueprint

Lawmakers and regulators said yesterday that an ambitious plan by the Treasury Department to revamp the nation's decades-old financial regulatory structure could require congressional action stretching over several years and would not help the economy out of its current credit crisis.

Battle lines are already forming over Treasury's major proposals even though top officials have just begun to digest the 200-page regulatory blueprint, which was released to them late Friday night.

Some Democrats and consumer groups criticized the plan for serving the needs of financial markets but not consumers. Former and current regulators hinted at a likely fight over proposals to strip authority from agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the head of another imperiled body, the Office of Thrift Supervision, was dismissive of the Treasury blueprint in an e-mail Friday to his employees. Other officials worried whether the effort to streamline financial oversight would lead to a massive disruption and elimination of positions across the federal government.

The bulls and bears in Congress will tussle over this. It won't pass, of course. First of all, the power structure is in flux there. And we may have a new President soon, I hope. Clinton's candidacy is now fading fast. People realize, she can't win through hook or crook. And the flurry of negative news about Obama's pastor is fading fast, too, as the economic whirlwind rapidly destroys more sectors of our economy. People are increasingly focused on the economy. And McCain's hope to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran and Iraq is going to be shoved aside in favor of 'hell, we have to save ourselves!' just as the Vietnam war abruptly ended not due to student uprisings or our inner cities burning but due to bankruptcy. Our economy was collapsing and we had to save ourselves. Our puppets in Vietnam had to fend for themselves.

If Obama is being advised by Volker, there is some hope we will avoid the 0% deflationary trap. One can only hope.

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Comments

[JSmith]

"Banks have ceased to lend money to students."

"All we have to do is have Congress decide to vote for the AMERICAN PEOPLE and FUND the education of OUR CHILDREN."

This is one area where you and I can agree completely: funding education is one of the things government SHOULD be doing.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I should hope so, Smith. Since the founding of the colonies, the concept of community schools supported by the government has been a huge American innovation.

[K]

What I find frightening is that these are the most secure loans. You can basically NEVER get free of them in bankruptcy. The IRS will collect on the loan via withholding tax refunds. Your wages may be garnished.

At least for now you most likely wouldn't be extradited from another country:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080204081508AAB1Rni

Even dying or becoming permanently disabled may not free you and your family of this debt:

http://media.www.bgnews.com/media/storage/paper883/news/2007/07/25/Campus/Loans.Wont.Disappear.After.Death-2926749.shtml

And that applies to the private loans too.

http://www.mobilize.org/index.php?tray=content&tid=top401&cid=272

If banks think these loans are too risky then the end is surely nigh.

[Christian W]

The banks of Iceland are tottering too, they went overboard with the carry trade. Now they are crying speculators are out to get them heh.

[Christian W]

Oops forgot the link:

http://tinyurl.com/2taanl

[Teddy]

Elaine, you and I have discussed the incredible cost of a college education before. Because of global wage arbitrage, for most college graduates as far as salaries, it has gotten to the point that it is not worth the tremendous cost of that education to go to college, even for professionals. It appears that jobs that could not be outsourced such as teaching are now going to be affected. Maybe tuition costs and professor's salaries will drop dramatically since they have been increasing much faster than inflation for the last 20 years or so since there was a surge in college students because it was considered the only way to get ahead in the global economy. Let's start building state of the art factories for our children which will ultimately support the rest of our economy including teaching.

[Crimson Ghost]

Elaine

I usually agree you but differ strongly on college loans.

The fact is that inflation in the higher education "industry" has been running far ahead of overall inflation for decades. Just like housing, we have had a bubble in college costs fueled by excessively easy credit. And this at a time when the "value" of many college degrees is dropping because of globalization.

This hugely bloated sector needs to downsize and cut costs in a serious way.

[Christian W]

@Crimson Ghost

But white collar jobs and education was supposed to make up for all the jobs lost to globalization...

[Paul S]

Poor poor education lobby. For years they were able to get away with above inflation rate tuition increases because the banks were there to act as enabler. Of course, this means saddling students/graduates with debt, but aw, what the heck. What a nice way for a new College graduate to start out in life: with student loans to pay off. The higher education system would NEVER have gotten away with these price increases if students did not have the "privilege" of going into debt via student loans. They would have tapped out much earlier and THEN we would be discussing the cost of education. Instead, we have the worst of both worlds: students starting out in life already in debt AND a wildly expensive education system. Don't you get it? The banks and the higher education lobbies were working together for each others benefit and to hell with the fact that the supposed "benficiary," the student, is the one who has to pay the freight. And let's not forget that the banks, a.) have 100% guaranteed repayment for their student loans (almost impossible to match, unless you are tight with Paul Bernanke or Henry Paulson) and b.) on top of your !00% guarantee of repayment, you get to take a 'service fee' off the top of the loan for the privilege of giving the money to students. Nope. The banks and Colleges had a sweet deal going. Maybe out of all this will come the LONG LONG overdue discussion about cost containment. Let's have a higher education system that is directed at the student benefit and not endowment growth so University mandarins can have an ever larger financial Empire. Time is long overdue for the Coleges and Universities to be accountable; answer to a reasonable set of standards where the student really IS the main benficiary and it's not just some mantra that the corrupt parites mouth to wrangle money out of the system. I am all in favor of higher eduacation--although I think K-12 education should be upgraded first; we need to have 12th graders graduating from high school who HAVE 12th grade reading, writing and 'rithnetic levels of performance. I think if we had had a better educated public in this country, the ruling class would not have been able to pull half the crap they have.

[Teddy]

Paulson is proposing more pure fantasy, refusing to mark to market the bad loans. Basically, he wants to bail out the non-performing leveraged with more leverage using taxpayer money that we don't have. Isn't this leveraging of the derivatives that are leveraging the orignal debt an oxymoron under the circumstances, I mean how do you leverage over-leveraged debt when you have negative savings? If it works, it would require the consumer (sheeple) to have the utmost confidence to go deeper into debt and be fleeced one more time, leading to more concentration of the wealth. But really, how long can that last? So far, foreign central bankers seem to like the speech since the dollar is stable. Do you think they want more of our jobs and will buy more of our bad debt?

[dgh]

I don't have the numbers to back me up, but didn't college costs start to skyrocket as the government started understating inflation? Could it be that college costs have gone up at the real rate of inflation because so little of a brick and mortar college or university can be outsourced? By the way, many colleges and universities are outsourcing some departments and functions. If loans truly dry up and costs continue to rise, the college experience will have to change dramatically in order to be available to middle class Americans. Not very many schools have obscene endowments, and some institutions are paying expenses out of their endowments now to keep tuition competitive. They cannot do that for long.

[Elaine Supkis]

I should have made is clear that college loans, being 'safe' are NOT PROFITABLE. Banks want a bigger return like with the credit card loans.

About schools: my family has been involved in all this for generations. My daughter still is. Pay is, for the most part, wretched. I once worked for a major university, RPI, pay was atrocious. We did this for the side benefits to pay for children's education in the future!

No, the people who are well-paid happen to be the most useless. Football and basketball coaches being the main beneficiaries.

[Pat O'Meara]

It may be that the education lobby has ripped off the students and needs fixing but the students must be educated or the country will be third world.
I think you will see the Monolines being rescued, perhaps nationalized, but the banks will be saved and the toxic waste will be valued at near face value. When the government honours the insurence they will trade and the taxpayers will eat it, again.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Possibly totally correct, Pat. Alas.

[Dutch]

Fuck'em. The Universities never taught anything anyway, the only thing they produced was educated idiots like we have now running the economy! Get out of the country if you dont want to sharpen your hoes and garden we are gonna be in a food crises. Articles on the web are talking about food riots around the globe already. One anaylist stated that this was going to be a problem in the third world. Guess what? We are a third world country! Has anyone drove around and takin a look lately? We are and have been for quite some time. Society was just an illusion for the last twenty years maybe a little longer. Start your own economy locally by barter. Food has become valuable again because the government cannot afford to subsidize prices down anymore!

[K]

@ Dutch

Funny you should say that. I recall hearing Americans saying the same thing about England on a visit about 10 years ago..."England is really a third world country." I liked what I saw there. Namely the zoning that maintained farm land by limiting development, and the greater access to medicine and medical care.

[Onward and Upward]

Bushit Co. et Al are putting tremendous pressure on all banks globally not to deal or service ANYTHING from Iran. It is so over the top, even within banking circles, that some are actually marking at as the start of hostilities (war) with Iran. If you did this to almost any other nation, strangle their ability to even use the banking system for any purpose, they would consider it an act of war.

This is going to be the great distraction when the dam breaks shortly over finances.

Look, look, over there, Iran is starting a war with US!

[Daliwood]

Tennessee has a lottery, the proceeds of which are used to provide scholarships to Tenn. residents who attend college here. I voted against the lottery for a number of reasons, but one of my main concerns has now proved to be true: the money is mostly going to upper-middle-class kids. It's become welfare for the well to do, not scholarships. There's also a surplus of money now (roughly $400 million), and of course the politicians are arguing about how best to spend it. One proposal is to give grants to returning Iraq/Afghanistan vets to go to college because the GI Bill under Bush now pays only about 60% of the cost of college. Last year, lottery scholarships in Tenn. were awarded solely on the basis of grades, so plenty of the State's wealthiest families sent their kids to college for free. Now there's a battle in the State Legislature, with the Republicans desperately trying to ensure that no minorities or poor people get any of the money.

Meanwhile, as the rich kids sun by the pool waiting for their lottery checks, the State cuts benefits to the severely retarded:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/mar/31/cruel-cuts-state-says-funding-changes-services-are/

And truckers are going bankrupt:

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=56120

And people are pawning their jewelry to buy gas:

http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?s=8068511

Relatedly, perhaps, I've noticed that in the new--and collapsing--world of credit, I am at an advantage. I have always had a high credit score, but banks don't enjoy lending to people like me who never borrow more than they can afford to pay back, never pay late, and never run a balance on a credit card. They see me as a financial traitor to the nation. I was low risk, low return--a neocon banker's nightmare. Now, however, I'm suddenly very popular. I applied for an auto loan recently and was approved over the phone once they saw my credit report. My mortgage company (Countrywide) is begging me to take out a home equity loan of $140,000.

I notice, however, that it's still relatively easy to get money for people like me--but only if you want to go shopping with it or buy a big-ticket item. As you have noted, the elites want to continue the same cycle: debt-based wealth and consumerism, which is actually poverty if people would only look at it sensibly.

[Daliwood]

Sorry, that first link didn't work:

Try this.

[Paul S]

I believe if we don't get costs under control, a University education will be unaffordable to most in the Middle class. It already is that way for large numbers in the Middle class. If things continue, we really will have a third world country where only the upper classes attain higher education levels.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Thanks for the information, Daliwood. And yes, they are now cutting back on services to the 'disposable' people the rulers have no need for.

[Gary W]

All the noise about Iran is just thud and blunder, the US thrashing around impotently. Iran has oil, and they sell it to FRIENDS, for euros and yen. They also have large, well-equipped defence forces, not the sort of impoverished third-world country that is all the US can invade. Any military action against Iran would be the biggest fiasco since the Bay of Pigs, and hence, cannot be ruled out :-(

We have student loans in Australia too, which are repaid more or less reasonably through the income-tax system. Sadly, at the same time, the late unlamented government starved universities, forcing them to accept increasing "full fee-paying" students, that is, the progeny of the elite, local and overseas. It remains to be seen how the new government is going to recover from this damage.

[OC]

China have increased recruiting for teachers and lecturers at university level - I understand they plan to increase output of students greatly and the pay is going up and lots of money for research too!

The plan, as I understand, is to increase level of expertise needed to scale up to match Japanese technology and manufacturing capability. To do this, they needs lots and lots of brain power which they are prepared to pay.

1st step to the game plan: give shit loads of scholarships to PhD candidates to all overseas universities. They no longer fear students staying back in US after graduation as the students realize US is going down soon.

2nd step: once they have quality researchers and lecturers; turn on the tap to produce shit loads of researchers for all types of technology and manufacturing. Using same tactics as in Korean war; they plan to unleash human wave of researchers going after all technologies at the same time - Chinese version of Pearl harbor.

3rd step: lower levels of research or manufacturing is going to be over run. Gain enough market share to crush remaining opposition members by takeovers or market domination or cutting access to critical commodities or components or collapsing their currencies like Argentina.

4th step: Stock up, re-assess current situation, adopt defensive market positions and go after the good stuff.

5th step: in charge of entire manufacturing base in this planet, sit tight and hold out as long as possible like 1000 years - game over for the rest of us!!

Japanese and Korean counterstrike - abandon exposed positions in technological arena.

Step 1: Identify high value products.

Step 2: Put all resources into high value stuff and in manner not exposed to future Chinese threats such as dependency on rare metals from China (China controls 95% of entire planet's rare metals.

Step 3: Get a head start before human wave hits

[Teddy]

OC, it sounds like WWIII to me.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

The Chinese 50 year plan hatched 25 years ago is to put a pillow under the US and let it slowly collapse onto this pillow.

Our leaders know of this plan, they heard an earful from me about this back then. Now they are struggling against it but stupidly, as I expected.

They hope to tear apart China. The monks demonstrating is a pure CIA operation. The Dalai Lama has been backed by the CIA since 1960.

[JSmith]

Paul S.: "Time is long overdue for the Coleges and Universities to be accountable; answer to a reasonable set of standards where the student really IS the main benficiary..."

Students weren't ever the "main beneficiary" at the major universities, anyway. Those are research institutions where undergraduates are maybe third on the priority list. There are places where undergraduates are the main focus, but the big state schools and top-level privates ones aren't among them.

It's interesting that of the top ten universities in the world, only two (Oxford and Cambridge) arent in the US.

"Articles on the web are talking about food riots around the globe already. One anaylist stated that this was going to be a problem in the third world."

Are you sure that analyst isn't an educated idiot?

"The monks demonstrating is a pure CIA operation."

Nah - our CIA's too stupid to pull something like that off.

[Dutch]

Of course he was an educated idiot. You would have to be half mad to believe what I know.

[Dutch]

We need the three R's reeding, riting, and 'rithmuhtic!

[John]

"So I say, arrest these guys. The top ones have many millions in profits from this fraud. Governments can use these profits to fund education for our youth."

Great idea!

One problem: The Monkey King has NO desire that people be educated. 'Taught to the test,' sure - this makes them more efficient drones, better gears in the corporatist machinery. But an actually educated populace?! Perish the thought!

Arresting them is no good; as I noted elsewhere, they own the CJ system - lock, stock and barrel. No, they must swing from gallows erected on the steps of the Capitol, at high noon, on July 4th.

Vive la résistance! Vive la révolution! La mort aux tyrans!

Homie is SICK OF THIS SHIT.

[JSmith]

"Homie is SICK OF THIS SHIT."

Homie? Who's Homie?