Rasha B. Foda

American Gulag – Student Debt until you’re Dead

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While Americans are busy entertaining themselves and hating each other, bankers and their stooges in government are busting out the legal screws to make sure their casino capital ponzi scheme works against an increasingly “educated” populace.

They want 100% efficiency and they’re not afraid to force you to “pay them back,”by any means necessary, for the money they created from thin air, the moment you signed your life away.

After all, their “learn more to earn more” scheme cannot be allowed to go to waste, with quaint notions of jubilee or loan forgiveness.

In October, 42 nurses’ licenses were suspended for failure to repay their federal student loans, including three in Chattanooga, according to the Tennessee Department of Health’s monthly disciplinary action report.

That’s not all. In at least two states (Montana and Iowa) the government will revoke your license to drive indefinitely until student loan associations notify them of your compliance.

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Finally, if you manage to live through the rest of your youth without working or driving, the government will garnish 15% of your paltry social security check, making it that much more impossible to live.

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So, essentially, our modern day overlords, unlike their medieval counterparts of past, have dispensed with unpopular debtors’ prisons and instead relegated noncompliant student debtors to a life of idle poverty, for which they have no one to blame but themselves – or so they would have us believe. After all, everyone else obediently “works their way” through a system that’s thoroughly corrupt and rigged to benefit the 1%.

If you’re not willing (or able) to work and give them their share of your pie, you’ll get nothing at all, and be forced to live a life of abject poverty – for failing to do exactly what they said.

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Technically, it’s not “forced” labor, but it’s as close as it gets. They don’t threaten to break your legs – just crush your dreams, dissolve your family, and destroy your life as you know it.

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All that for student loans that were created from thin air by people who can’t be described as anything less than state sanctioned extortionists. The result – a system of forced labor that works through shame, humiliation, isolation, and exclusion from the resources of our planet, until you are dead.

If that’s not a gulag, I don’t know what is.

EducationDebtorsPrison

5 comments

  1. From a related article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/08/20/student-loan-horror-stories-whats-the-worst-than-can-happen/

    A Life on the Run

    Matthew Bridges* is a 65-year-old college professor who teaches science classes online. He’s also, in his words, “a fugitive” because an insurmountable level of student loan debt has upended his entire world.

    By his creditors’ last tally, Bridges owes a jaw-dropping $1.75 million in student loans. To escape unrelenting harassment from debt collectors, Bridges fled the country in 2006 to live and work in the Philippines.

    Bridges spoke to WalletPop recently during a brief visit back to the U.S., where he shared his story and explained why he took the drastic step of leaving his homeland. For starters, his college debt load wasn’t always so staggering.

    Bridges first earned a science degree in 1984 and later obtained a PhD. in 1996 from a for-profit college in Texas. By the time he finished his doctorate, Bridges owed $104,000 in student loans.

    Over the course of more than 25 years, however, interest on all his loans has compounded, and late fees plus penalties have been tacked on to what he owed. Some interest rates were as high as 29.99%, and collection charges of roughly 25% have been added to his debt, he says. “I’ll never be able to earn my way out of this problem,” says Bridges.

    Because he is dyslexic and suffered various physical ailments, Bridges endured long bouts of unemployment throughout his career. At one point in his earlier years, “I was eating out of a dumpster,” he recalls.

    Later, when he earned his PhD at age 51, his employment prospects still didn’t improve much. “No university wanted to hire anyone 51,” he says. “They wanted to hire people who were 30.”

    It’s only been in the past seven years, after being diagnosed as a lifelong dyslexic and getting medication from a Veterans Administration hospital, that he’s been able to work steadily. He says his income has ranged from $20,000 to $50,000 annually, with 2009 being his “best year ever.”

    Still, his earnings aren’t enough to even pay the interest on his student loans.

    Ridiculed and Threatened

    Bridges got married in 1994 and for much of the past 16 years, he said he and his wife have lived in “sheer terror” of relentless, abusive collection agents. “They used every manner of profanity imaginable,” he says. “They ridiculed me, my degree and my humanity.”

    “They misrepresented themselves as being from the federal government,” he adds, “and said that if I didn’t pay in full, they had ways and means of locating me and making sure that me and all my family members were taken to court and made to testify.

    “I’m the only survivor in my family,” Bridges says. But his wife’s relatives are a large, close-knit group. “I didn’t want to drag her family through that.”

    Unfortunately for Bridges, many of the debt collectors’ threats came true. His wages have been garnished, and his federal income taxes taken annually. “Sometimes, my tax return would be as much as $2,500 or $3,000, but they always took it,” says Bridges. “My wife would have to file something called an innocent spouse form,” so the IRS wouldn’t snatch any refund due her.

    Then one day, Bridges and his wife went to the Philippines, partly for recreation but mainly to escape the isolation and pressure of living with his big debts. He says he actually got the idea to stay abroad at the suggestion of a “friendly” debt collector who told him: “You know you’ll never pay this money off. People like you usually just go to another country.”

    That idea stuck in his head. So in 2006, he did just that, fleeing America to escape his student loans. In recent years, Bridges and his wife have lived in the Philippines, taught at a school there, and finally enjoyed an existence free from student loan creditors.

    Despite the peace that came from living overseas, being away from family eventually gnawed at his wife. She missed her daughter and grandchildren terribly, and wanted to be back in the United States. “The fact that I have to hide from the student loan people has been an incredible burden on both of us, and an incredible factor in the tension in our marriage,” Bridges says.

    “I’m literally a fugitive. I feel like a criminal,” he adds. “I can’t own anything. I’m afraid of the knock on the door. I’ve got the blinds drawn. And when there’s a knock on the door or if someone drives up, I first peek out the window to see if I recognize the person or the car. If I don’t, I don’t answer.”

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  2. He who seeks the benefit must stand at the burden.
    Every man is presumed to attend the natural and probable consequences of his own voluntary acts. This is a big deal with the SOB’s they want to induce man into slavery voluntarily!
    The agreement of the parties makes the law of the contract.
    The agreement of the parties overrides the law.
    No injury is done by things long acquiesced in because long sufferance is construed as consent.

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