Tag Archives | Debt

America’s Student Debt Crisis

By on August 24, 2012 in News 10

Picture: j.o.h.n. walker (CC)

Student debt activists and education advocates Kyle McCarthy and Natalia Abrams are tired of the ‘silence and complacency’ that our elected (and duly bribed) officials exhibit in the face of overwhelming evidence of usury and millions of voices of the disaffected. At least two out of three of students take out loans for college and at least 1 out of 5 of those will default.

Via Huffington Post:

Since 1978, college tuition has skyrocketed by over 900%, while simultaneously, grants and scholarships continue to be slashed. The result? Students are forced to mortgage their futures with student debt, from which there is no escape. In 2010, student debt actually eclipsed credit card debt as the second largest consumer debt in the country (second only to mortgage debt, surpassing $1 trillionin total). The Atlantic recently reported that, since 1999, student debt has increased by 511%.

… Read the rest

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Banks Falsify Credit Card Lawsuits in Ninety Percent of Cases?

By on August 16, 2012 in News 6

Philip Taylor (CC)

We hear every week about the massive LIBOR interest rate fixing, or the shady practices by which banks drain money from local municipalities, or the false promises given to homeowners across the country by the finance industry, or as much as 90% of foreclosed homes remaining off the market but still shuttered in and out of dispassionate algorithms, or that San Francisco’s assessor discovered ‘errors’ in 84% of home mortgage foreclosures (read: scams). It’s not a big leap of the imagination then to consider that almost all credit card lawsuits brought by banks are fraudulent. Lenders are still continuing the dubious fraud that caused such a scandal last year with robo-signing.

via Russia Today:

US credit card companies have been churning out lawsuits and improperly collecting debt from consumers 90 percent of the time, at least according to a New York judge who deals with these cases.

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Disinfo OpenVideo: Download ‘In Debt We Trust’

By on July 22, 2012 in News, OpenVideo 1

Every week The Disinformation Company offers a different disinformation® documentary as a DRM-free download for the discounted price of $1.99. The sale price is available for one week only. All digital downloads are high quality MP4 video. This week’s disinformation® OpenVideo is IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts.

Download

Emmy-winning journalist Danny Schechter investigates America’s mounting debt crisis in his hard-hitting expose, IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts. The film reveals the unknown cabal of credit card companies, lobbyists, media conglomerates and the U.S. government itself who have colluded to deregulate the lending industry — ensuring that a culture of credit dependency can flourish.

Many Americans are “maxing out” on credit cards, living beyond their means, and are unable to make the minimum monthly payments. While these Americans struggle to manage their debt, there is a much deeper story at work: power is shifting into fewer hands with frightening consequences. Schechter exposes the hidden financial and political complex that allows the lowest wage earners to indebt themselves so heavily that even house repossessions are commonplace — dubbed “21st-century serfdom” by an expert featured in the film…

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Iceland Jails Bankers, Erases Citizens’ Debt, Recovers Strongly

By on July 19, 2012 in News 68

 Seriously, the most advanced place on Earth. Bloomberg writes:

Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.

Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population.

The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates.

Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn. Once it became clear back in October 2008 that the island’s banks were beyond saving, the government stepped in, ring-fenced the domestic accounts, and left international creditors in the lurch.

… Read the rest

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Grads Face Spectre Of Student Debt Related Suicide

By on July 10, 2012 in News 9

A fatal peril of life in the 21st century? Via the Huffington Post, C. Cryn Johannsen says:

Suicide is the dark side of the student lending crisis and, despite all the media attention to the issue of student loans, it’s been severely under-reported. I can’t ignore it though, because I’m an advocate for people who are struggling to pay their student loans, and I’ve been receiving suicidal comments for over two years and occasionally hearing reports of actual suicides. More people are being forced into untenable financial circumstances as outstanding student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. Currently, 36 million Americans have outstanding federal loans.

I first started appreciating the depth of the problem of suicidal debtors a few years ago, with a post on my blog, All Education Matters, entitled, “Suicide Among Student Debtors: Who’s Thought About It?” I was stunned by the responses. In comment after comment, people confessed to feeling suicidal.

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Peter Thiel Will Pay You $100,000 To Drop Out Of College (If You Have An Idea He Likes)

By on June 8, 2012 in News 0

Considering student loan debt is now a trillion-dollar industry, maybe this PayPal co-founder is on to something. Via 60 Minutes:

One of the wealthiest, best-educated American entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, isn’t convinced college is worth the cost. With only half of recent U.S. college graduates in full-time jobs, and student loans now at $1 trillion, Thiel has come up with his own small-scale solution: pay a couple dozen of the nation’s most promising students $100,000 to walk away from college and pursue their passions. Morley Safer takes a look at Thiel’s critique of college.

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(Anonymous) Engineer Proposes A Full-Scale “USS Enterprise” That Can Be Built For $1 Trillion

By on June 1, 2012 in News 3

OV-101Well, live long and prosper, then. As far as I know, there is only one space-faring vessel (yet) with the designation Enterprise. As James Holloway writes on GizMag:

An anonymous electrical and systems engineer going only by the moniker BTE-Dan has posted surprisingly detailed plans for a full-scale, functioning Starship Enterprise that he claims could be built in 20 years. Though it may be tempting to scoff at such lofty ambition, the Build the Enterprise website (up all of one week) includes specifications, costs, mission plan and funding strategies, all suggesting that a serious amount of thought has gone into creating a real world counterpart to the icon spaceship of the TV and movie series, Star Trek.

The project appears to be born of Dan’s frustration with humankind’s present spacefaring efforts. Dan more or less dismisses the International Space Station for its lack of gravity and cramped quarters, describing its toilet facilities as “comical and primitive,” and musing how the money may have been better spent.

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U.S. Lets China Bypass Wall Street for Treasury Orders

By on May 23, 2012 in News 0

US TreasuryThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Via Reuters:

China can now bypass Wall Street when buying U.S. government debt and go straight to the U.S. Treasury, in what is the Treasury’s first-ever direct relationship with a foreign government.

The relationship means the People’s Bank of China buys U.S. debt using a different method than any other central bank in the world.

The other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders for U.S. debt with major Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.

China, which holds $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, still buys some Treasuries through primary dealers, but since June 2011, that route hasn’t been necessary. The documents viewed by Reuters show the U.S. Treasury Department has given the People’s Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which the Chinese first used to buy two-year notes in late June 2011.

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How Government and Corporations Loot the Poor

By on May 22, 2012 in News 2
Capitalist Flag

Illustration: Hhemken (CC)

Barbara Ehrenreich writes at TomDispatch:

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

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