[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Buried beneath the headlines of healthcare triumph this morning is equally precious news on education: college loan reform finally passed and looks likely to be signed into law, incredibly good important news for millions of our young people trying to get a college degree.
Josh Marshall writes this morning on the pervasive, pernicious groupthink that clamps down on Washington DC like a hungry octopus, perceptions of political and economic reality completely overwhelmed by fierce tentacles of lobbying, frenetic lousy media, nationalism, and ridiculous inflated flabby ego. Marshall is dead-on correct, for college loan reform is being passed only with a semi-desperate reconciliation move, despite all the screaming need and pain for reform the normal process died long ago in the Senate, had it not been for reconciliation our young people needing help for college would have been brutally screwed. Again.
Our Senate is so god damn lost, so useless in its deliberate obtuse stubbornness to be a real partner with the People’s House. Not only does college loan reform help our little people, of course, but it saves $36 billion in useless middleman costs! Waste that went right into the pockets of those horrible bankers, the political stupidity and cluelessness of the US Senate is an incredible vast monument for the ability of humanity to lie to itself, how these idiots ever think they’re doing they’re jobs or are helping America in any way just blows my mind.
Had nothing happened it was just Oh Well time (for the millionth time) on abusing our young people with neglect. We courted them assiduously during the campaign and then forgot about them again. Minority youth employment is a terrible travesty for an industrialized nation, millions have no health insurance of any kind, college gets more crazy expensive every year but never mind, American. The day when we offered an ever-brighter future to each successive generation is over, just lump it, bitch, all over, we’ve got banks to rescue and prop up with subsidy.
How the Senate and DC is blind to this related to the hopes and dreams of our young people—for reform that saves precious billions—in its vast hold of groupthink is hard to believe. It’s as if they could never comprehend growing up with hand-me-downs in a series of apartments with a single mom, facing all the fears and doubts about who you are and what you can do, yes you can go out and build a better life with a degree, if only you could get it. If only you had the money to go, if only you had a government that would loan it to you without screwing you and everybody else in the process.
To lose those dreams—just little modest dreams of a plain American life—in wasted decades of grinding poverty in a world that will always could-have-been is a tragedy we inflict with vicious cruelty with galling frequency in the United States. Again, how DC and the Senate could not pass student loan reform in our current environment is a platinum example of human souls totally lost in a fantasy other-world.
The articles I read this morning on passage did not state the legislative champion or team of champions that insisted student loan reform must pass, even if it had to be with Senate reconciliation. There had to have been a zealous individual or group behind this, if anyone knows who it was please mail me or let us know in the comments. These are our heroes, we need to know who they are and how we can help and protect them, no matter how small the effort. Praise baby Jesus and baseball we still have legislators firmly rooted in reality and the dreams of our young people.
These semi-saints are Democrats, of course. I bitched and moaned and complained through what I thought was a total nightmare of a healthcare legislative evolution, yet my Party loyalty was never in doubt, nor my vote this Fall, for precisely this reason, the only hope for America is the Democratic Party.
This is just student loan reform, of course, we have an incredibly long way to go in building out and funding K-12, creating an industrial policy that focuses on little people instead of banks so young men and women can work, and making sure we leave them an environment that is healthy. Seems like a very long stretch for a town like DC so totally in orbit in some far, far away universe, but if student loan reform can happen other progress is always possible.