Christie: Debt-free college is 'wrong'

[jmowreader]

67. He's just trying to bring back the Good Old Days

"The good old days weren't always good."
--Billy Joel, Keeping the Faith

The Republicans' ideal man of fiction isn't Don Draper, Gordon Gekko or the cowboys played by John Wayne. It's Dagwood Bumstead: a married, white heterosexual male with two children who's been shit on by the same tyrannical boss for 85 years.

The only way we are ever going to return America to a time when employees would accept any degree of abuse you wanted to heap on them, is to make them live in fear. It's not legal to overtly create a hostile work environment, so the business community has changed to another, better, three-step plan.

Step 1: get college priced high enough that there are exactly two ways to obtain an education: join the Army, use the GI Bill to pay for college then encounter widespread ageism because entry-level sales executive trainees are supposed to be 22 years old, not 26; or take out a mortgage to pay for your schooling.

Step 2: get those congressmen you spent all that money to buy to make student loans non-dismissible in bankruptcy.

Step 3: use a combination of H1B visas, offshoring, outsourcing, rightsizing, etc. to reduce headcount to the point where every person in the company lives under the belief that his or her job is going to be the next one to go...which, since you're walking around holding $100,000 worth of loans you HAVE to pay off, would be a fate worse than death. Even the faintest hint of disloyalty - like...oh, I don't know, someone calling your workplace to ask the dates you were employed there - might be enough to get not only you, but all your friends and co-workers, escorted out of the building.

Don't you think MAYBE there's a reason why the kinds of jobs you used to learn from "Frank" who had been in the business for the last seventy years, now require a bachelor's degree?