*sigh* Countless people who don’t read our blog but know of it flooded our Facebook and twitter accounts with messages like this one “Didja seeee what Congress did?! Are ya gonna write about it?!” Each time we said yes just to see if anyone would actually follow up. We said we’d write an article if anyone ever did. Guess what?

But here at Debtors Prison we believe that if someone writes the truth and nobody reads it, it’s still righteous. And the truth is that 1) any fool could tell you Congress wouldn’t act 2) the difference in interest rates wouldn’t help the vast majority of us 3) we’ve reached a new stage where even a dramatic decrease in PRINCIPLE OWED would be meaningless to a lot of us.

Wow, Congress couldn’t agree on something? Really?? Remember last summer when Congress refused to maintain reasonable interest on the country’s own debt by forcing the first ever downgrade in our credit rating? Yeah and you thought they were gonna help YOU out? Ha!

And did someone forget we’re just talking about interest? The rate at which your debt is GROWING. Think of it like this. You’re running behind a train a quarter-mile ahead of you and its MAINTAINING it’s 38 mile per hour speed and original destination instead of accelerating to 60 something going someplace farther away. That’s all an extension would have done folks.

And see, here’s the kicker. For a lot us even principle forgiveness, substantial principle forgiveness, isn’t going to do the trick. I’m 32 years old. I have nothing to show for my first decade and change of working. I have no house, investments, car, miscellaneous possessions or marketable skills. I work in the cash-based service industry and couldn’t switch to regular credit cards and bank accounts because I also can’t afford to pay taxes. I haven’t paid a student loan in years so it affects my cash flow not at all. My student debt is becoming as meaningless as the National Debt.

Finally my mindset is all messed up. I look at homes and children as something people used to do in the 1950’s. I
think that knowing what you are going to make any given month is impossible without omnipotence or time travel. I consider education a mistake like drunk driving. I think of a successful relationship as one that provides sex, companionship and pooled resources with an acceptable amount of risk re: emotional attachment or falling for the illusion of permanence.

It’s…too late for me and it’s too late for countless others.

As a hoodie-wearing, ultra-liberal young black man with an afro and a faded Obama t-shirt I often get asked to comment on the Trayvon Martin case.  However, rarely am I asked in the context of someone actually trying to learn something, I am asked in the context of someone who wants to start an argument, usually something Gingrich or Hannity-esque, along the lines of a young person was shot by an over zealous community watch type person who thought he was a member of the Watchmen.  If only that were the case.  As it turns out Trayvon Martin’s murder was a hate crime committed by George Zimmerman in conjunction with the Sanford County Police Department.  It is unique only in the carelessness of the murderer and his police department accomplice.  Finally, and here is why it is on the blog, millions of young black men go to college to 1) help create a world where things like this don’t happen and 2) try and avoid this fate themselves.

While I don’t have a conservative screaming in my ear, let’s review what happened.  A regular citizen, with no official authority whatsoever and a criminal record clearly states his intention to follow and aggressively confront another citizen whom he suspects not of being in the midst of criminal activity, but of being a criminal, simply because of his race.  This citizen turns out to be an unarmed child who the regular citizen, a grown man almost twice the weight of said child, then guns down.

Stop right there.  Here are the details that make this particular occurrence unusual.  First, the caller uses racial slurs. Second, AFTER the killing, nothing is planted on the victim.  No gun, no drugs, no knife, no jewelry, not even a spork from the convenience store.  Third, the victim (at least as far as we know) never had any documented run-in with the police and Fourth, the officer presiding over the case was known not to prosecute the assault and murder of undesirables (like the homeless) for sport. From a machiavellian standpoint it is easy to see how this could have happened and none of us would have ever heard about it…like it actually does everyday.

More on what this had to do with college and debt after the jump

So conservatives and white people with the warm and fuzzies because we have a black President that they voted for so they could tell all their friends how not racist they are rush to portray this as an isolated incident with the least credible among them also trying to contend that their is no racial element.  Now of course we know in the black community this is foolishness.  We’ve thought of the “criminal justice” system as the “oppression lottery” system for hundreds of years.  The question is, what to do about it? It used to be higher education.  That’s not so much the answer anymore.

We all remember the Professor Gates scandal that led to the President sharing a beer with an old friend and a racist cop.  Now, if a Harvard professor can be arrested in his own home, this should teach us, DESPITE THE FACT that our current President got to the White House primarily through academia that education in and of itself is not the answer.  Carrying your Ivy-League diploma in your back pocket will not keep a fat white stranger from shooting you in the face because of the color of your skin, admitting to it, and unlike even the Emmett Till murderers, not even be arrested.  Think about that for a moment, almost sixty years after Emmett Till, with a black President, we…can’t…even…get…an…arrest.

Now, I am not advocating that kids drop out of school or don’t go to college because what’s the point, the Klan is coming for me and I might as well smoke up and drink until then. My point is that the plan needs tweaking.

Instead of

1) Study Hard. 2) Get into an Ivy-League or top-ranked college 3) borrow whatever it takes to get there 4) Major in Liberal Arts, preferably African-American studies while never volunteering in the community, working, or reading anything on my own 5) Hope to get a job that doesn’t require or isn’t helped by my degree in a predominantly white institution and if that fails repeat steps 1-5 in a non-technical graduate school

We should

1) Study Hard. 2) Pick a career path based on the development of specific marketable skills 3) Get into colleges known for developing those skills and pick one that is in-state, has a generous scholarship program or is an HBCU 4) Major in something concrete while volunteering in your community and picking up books about your history and reading them on your own time 5) Apply for jobs in your area of technical expertise 6) Learn the business so you can start your own OR have profitable side ventures OR invest in whatever your “reach” career might have been, such as writing, acting, etc.

Because at the end of the day it’s not the education that society responds to assign value to a human life. It’s the money.

I have been asked to comment on the recent NY Times piece: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.  Below are my thoughts:

This is not say there are no benefits to going to a magnet school.  I think it nurtures the sleeping activist in all African-Americans.  There is a certain satisfaction in entering a hostile environment, making eye contact with everyone you see in the halls and affirming your right to exist.

There are three ways to deal with student loans: 1) pay them with “your” money 2) pay them with new debt dischargeable in bankruptcy or 3) don’t pay them. In order to not pay debt you must transfer your life to a credit free existence.  This is not as hard as it sounds.

First the bad news: you won’t be able to buy a house OR RENT a place from someone you don’t know. A new car will never happen. Every imaginable context for spending money socially will be more difficult/awkward.

Now the Good News: If you can use your your life network to find a place to live you’ve done the hardest part and you’ve just saved yourself $400,000 (what it actually costs to pay off $150k over the course of a lifetime).

Look, living a credit-free existence is just good financial advice regardless of what kind of debt or lack thereof you  are in. If you like the look and feel of plastic there is a thing called a debit card.

Now if you’re like me and never have a balance that would raise any red flags you’re done. If you ever DO actually accumulate more than say, $10k you are going to want to look into offshore banking and you are going to have to make sure no significant asset is ever in your name. But that really is all there is to it.

Recently Benito singled me out as not having written anything in a while. Of course I am actually interviewing people for a post good enough to sit on the blog for a solid 3 months which it seems is par for the course now that everyone is “occupying” or similarly indisposed. Oh wait, that’s just Benito. I’d love to hear everyone else’s excuse. But rather than rush my article or take Benito’s jab lying down I thought I’d comment on a recent ATL post about the Cardozo kid who was “homeless” for 9 weeks.

I am not going to rehash the obvious which is that this stupid kid wasn’t homeless in any real sense of the word. What I am going to say is that what he did is not only easy, but when taken in conjunction with M.I.T.’s new program could also be a part of the new future we are looking at.

Here me out.

Say Benito is right and M.I.T.’s solution actually takes hold. Education becomes cheaper, MUCH MUCH cheaper…around the price of room and board. A rational actor could choose in that situation to be…I’m sorry I can’t disrespect millions of Americans by continuing to use the word “homeless” let’s go with transient.

You’ ve got a food plan, facilities that are open close to all night, gyms with showers, common areas in dorms where you can crash, etc. Really only one thing suffers: your social life. And that just means you study more.

I did the math recently and figured that if I had started working at my food truck when I was in school and hadn’t borrowed money to live like I was a member of the middle class I would be almost debt-free today.

A lot of problems have simple solutions. Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian Statehood with Independent sovereignty of Jerusalem and the West Bank with each side alternating control every four years. Problem solved, you’re welcome world. But that ain’t getting pitched at Camp David and Applebaum’s legislation ain’t getting proposed in Congress despite the high probability of it working.

True, there are the Benitos and Triforces of the world. I would argue however that most individuals with high debt loads acquired them because they desired a certain material lifestyle and their loans are the chief obstacle preventing the employed individuals from purchasing the toys they associate with their high powered jobs.

The average person with a heavy student debt load has also made friends with many many rich people so they have specific toys they want to buy. These people have been trained to view consumption as a birth right. Give them more money and they will buy.

Why aren’t they buying now? Well, first, they are. It’s a question of quantity. What separates Triforce from most isn’t his determination to have twice as much as his neighbor, it’s his seeming immunity from fear if he is in fact not full of shit because top-shelf liquor was a little sparse last time I was there and his car has been detailed in awhile. Killing the loans will kill the fear. These idiots who get 100k forgiven will within 9 months spend at least twice that on upgrading their home, car, computer, phone, clothes, at least one thing they’ve never had (skis, a motor cycle, country club membership) and will go out to eat twice if not three times as often. It is the ultimate stimulus targeted to the greatest economic engine in the world: the American sense of entitlement.

That said it will never happen. Even Triforce acknowledges it’s political suicide. And I mean did we forget we have a Congress that ran on not passing any law with the potential to be signed by a black man? None of the things Triforce listed could pass under this current Congress AND each of those things were the product of decades of work. We are the first generation to be screwed by the educational system in this country from the vantage point of financing. Alot of gay, old and sick people had to die before Congress even noticed them and that was with congressional bodies not philosophically opposed to working with the President.

Ugh. I feel like I am the only person who still posts around here. That is one of the problems with a blog like this – everyone thinks someone else will pick up the slack. But on to the point at hand.

When you’re black one of the difficult things about dealing with non-black people (Asians, South Asians and “mixed” people are also notorious for this) is figuring out which ones are sheltered/ignorant/slow and which ones purposefully propagate falsehoods in order to serve their own self-interest.

Take the Internet meme where the black woman thinks she doesn’t have to pay her mortgage because Obama is President. The first non-black thinks this is a representation of a large percentage of blacks. The second circulates it to perpetuate that type of nonsense and add to the plethora of material non-black children are exposed to in order to condition them to think that black = inferior. After all, the schools have been almost desegregated for almost a generation now and look who is in the White House?

But I digress. Drum roll please…the reason black unemployment is still so high is discrimination. Yes! Believe it or not folks holding all other factors from education to industry constant there is a much higher unemployment index for blacks and it’s discrimination.

But Alpha Man, shouldn’t a black President help, just a little?

No! Here’s why. All major progress with respect to race has with it a brutal backlash. After the Civil War we saw the rise of the KKK. After Civil Rights we saw the rise of Southern Republicanism and after Barack Obama we have the Tea Party. Also, more than ever white people feel threatened, like maybe after 500 years the get out of jail free card that is being white has finally expired and that is causing them to hold onto what is theirs like never before.

There is also another issue here. A lot of white (as opposed to non-black because only white men once owned slaves here) men are threatened by this tall, handsome black President…whose mother happened to be white and whose beautiful wife happens to be black. See, it used to be the white man who had both a black family and a white family. But here this man is with both and he didn’t have to be a rapist to get it and all of his children are with the same woman. For historical reasons this bothers a lot of white men (to be fair I met an Indian guy who had the same problem). If you ever meet a guy who will at once trash Obama for being black and then in the next breath say he’s not really black because his mother raised him and she was white, then you have met someone with the hang up by just described. A lot of these men unfortunately make hiring decisions and THIS phenomenon explains why black male employment is lower than black female employment.

So one of my closet KKK facebook friends recently started writing bullshit notes (because comments didn’t allow for enough space) and one of his first ones was a treatise on how to fix the country (or the Economy…I try not to read his garbage too carefully). Now, I’m a pretty arrogant guy, though not quite in Mike Triforce’s league. But even I wouldn’t write an unsolicited post like this one claiming that I can save the world because I am better than you. But I am. Because I’ll be damned if that Kentucky Fried Stars and Bars Good Ole Boy Saltine has the only word on this.

Ahem. Because everyone likes/only has the attention span for numbered list may I not so humbly offer: 1) social justice to include prison and drug reform 2) Adoption and 3) Inspiration

I have and will always say fuck the national debt. Never really considered it an issue so much so that if I have to take a dump and that’s the only reading material I’ll just take care of business like people probably did before civilization set in. However, you can’t argue some hard truths: We incarcerate an absurd percentage of our population, mostly for drug related offenses. If those people were working instead of costing the govt money, and the govt could tax a regulated market for marijuana and other drugs bye bye deficit, hello employment!

Adoption. Doesn’t it make you sick when some pompous asshole talks about how great his fucking parents are for basically just doing their fucking job? Does it ever occur to them that lots of parents did everything right and their kid still might not have been successful or that some people were successful despite coming from fucked up families? For shitssake people, you don’t parent because you are trying to raise the next President you parent because that is what you do. And not just for your own biological kids. Adopt people. I mean that both in the legal sense, as in get your ass to social services, and in the unofficial sense, as in observe your kids friends, acquaintances and kids you see in other situations. Do they look hungry, are they falling behind in school, do they need something? If they do that’s your responsibility. Get to work and take that fucking honor roll sticker off your newish car and don’t bitch about how you can’t afford it. It might also give your spoiled trifling children some perspective.

Finally inspiration. None of you will ever truly know what Obama’s election meant for this country or for the world. That’s because you lack the capacity to comprehend the significance of anything not directly related to your immediate self-interest. That’s not America. America acutely realized it’s unique existence despite the fact that life didn’t instantly and immediately change dramatically for colonists. This realization is a huge part of inspiration because at the end of the day America is the greatest country on earth in large part because it truly thinks it is.

Yep.  Even at this late date I could give a shit.  So the Republicans/Conservatives/Tea Partiers/People of hereditary privilege have found yet another way to trip up this President.  But what have we REALLY learned about the National Debt? Throughout this entire non-newsworthy debacle?

1) Congress has always overwhelming voted to raise the debt ceiling.

Why? Because it’s necessary.  Why aren’t they doing it now?  Let’s see…what major thing about Washington, the White House specifically, is different? No, it’s not that it’s a black President, there is just something magical about the number $14 trillion.  That’s just the natural limit for a country’s indebtedness.

2) Rich People are gonna get their money

Get real people.  There isn’t going to be any kind of default.  This is coming out of social security checks for old people and paychecks for our nation’s servicemen.

3) White people love money more than they love feeling superior because they are white

White people have had this choice before.  At the end of the Civil War rich white people could have devoted some of their slaves to the Confederate War effort and possibly saved their racial hierarchy.  But they decided overwhelmingly not to do this.  Robert E. Lee who popular legend would have you believe abhorred slavery, fought his father in-law’s will freeing his slaves because…he wanted money.  And he wanted to lead the Confederate forces because he thought his military career would advance quicker as the George Washington figure of a new country.

All that is to say that white people who make above X amount a year ALWAYS act in their self-interest.  Maybe that is true of all people who make above slave wages, as I have never heard of an Arabian Prince actually committing rather than just simply planning a suicide bombing.

Ugh.  I am tired of writing about this.  It took me 20 damn minutes to figure out how to load the icon that is my signature.  I just wanted to be on the record in late July saying I still don’t care one bit about the National Debt.  It’s a non-issue, like a runny noise is a non-disease.  I don’t care if you can’t find a tissue, or need a tissue for your runny damn nose while I’m sitting in the corner bleeding out.

So I have been pretty busy over in the politics section but I thought I would pop back to the main page to point out an obvious truth: you don’t have any friends. No, it’s true. If you were to marry your non-existent significant other the only people standing next to you would be siblings of the same gender at least one of which you hate or resent. But whatever.

Most of your former friends were of the same background education wise. Some of them succeeded where you failed and some failed right beside you. But every failed man is an island. There is no joke about two unemployed people entering a bar because there is nobody to pick up the tab.

Yeah despite what sitcoms and wedding toasts would have you believe this happens. This is life. People walk in and walk out of our lives. Imagine if you had to bury everyone you ever cared about who died before you?

Next, don’t try to make friends. It is a futile exercise until you are in a better place lifewise. However if you insist on trying to make friends remember how you made every other friend you ever had: through shared experiences that usually involve acquiring a skill or a right of passage.

Sit tight champ. I won’t say things will get better but you’re not done meeting people and there is still a chance to be about something.