It is in the interest of a nation that kids capable of doing so should be educated as far as they can go, without financial considerations. The GI Bill literally created America's post-war prosperity, and made us the envy of the world. That whole trend has now been perverted and, as this report shows, students are now just another group to milk for the benefit of the few. The damage this does will haunt ! us for generations.
Student Loans: The Next Housing Bubble
PAUL CAMPOS, Professor of Law – University of Colorado – Boulder – Salon
EXTRACT
In effect, the system allows any 22-year-old American University chooses to admit to borrow a sum equal to the average home mortgage, but without a single one of the actuarial controls that are supposed to minimize the risk that homeowners will borrow too much money.
– – – – – – –
Yet more on the growing New American Slavery trend. This is a really unhealthy vector for a democracy, and it is markedly racist.
The Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Private Prisons Blur the Line Between Real People and Real Estate
CHRISTOPHER PETRELLA – Truthout.org
EXTRACT
Although many criminal justice activists are quick to denounce the most egregious race-based expressions of prison privatization, ranging from involuntary prison labor to racially disparate sentencing policies, few, if any, have attended to the deeply racialized, yet somewhat arcane, relationship developing between the private prison industry and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Curiously, one of the best ways to understand exactly how the private prison industry views itself and its fundamental mission is to analyze changes in the IRS corporate filing status of private prison companies.
In July 2012, the GEO Group – the nation's second-largest private prison operator behind Corrections Corporation of America – sent a letter to the IRS requesting a conversion from a typical “class-c” corporation to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT).
