Senate & Congress Phone & Address Directory
Become Engaged - become a person who participates in their
own life and assists in a greater cause for the good of the whole, not just for
the sum of its parts.
Join the ‘student loan debt’ advocates & champions in
the fight towards changing American perceptions; there is a movement to reach
and change societal norms in regards of how people think of ‘student loan debt’
and the serious repercussions in aggregate when the next financial crisis hits.
When the student loan bubble bursts, and it will; the devastation will be long
reaching into our financial institutions, and then society will finally understand
the foreboding economic condition and the actors who were involved in allowing
this student loan debt catastrophe to happen: the responsible persons for the
Student Loan Debacle, is majority of Congress & the Senate.
And the many thousands of
individuals who are rising up and saying to Congress and the Senate “enough is
enough, get out of the pockets of special interest groups; quite catering hand
and foot to the PACS,” and do the job you were elected to do by the American
people, in assisting the American people and not big corporations, you know the
United States citizens, the ones who are paying your salaries!
And although, I believe an informed and engaged society is
mandatory for citizen commitment, recourse, and discourse; there are grassroots
organizations touting “don’t pay your student loans; and just walk away.” That
is ludicrous, you can never walk away from that form of debt, and your student loans
will follow and haunt you forever. There are ways in which to deal with your
student loans, but walking away from that debt is not one of them. There are
many programs to assist in managing your student loan debt: exhaust all possibilities
of repayment before just walking away and opting out of life. More info:
finaid.org
According to loansafe.org, “Since January 2010, the
Education Department has stopped going after defaulted loans of less than
$45,000 through the Justice Department. That doesn’t mean people who aren’t
making payments are off the hook. Bad loans of less than that are handled by
private law firms on a contract basis, Glickman says.”
“What people need to realize: Once you default on a student
loan, you owe that money forever,” Alabama’s Kelly says. “If we get a
settlement, we can place a lien against your house. You can’t refinance or sell
the house unless you clear up that debt. We get a lot of loans repaid when a
house is sold.”
What responsible financial entity, loans mega $$$ to
individuals without regards of their ability to repay that money. I’ll tell
you, monolith institutions whose clients have absolutely no recourse, because
Congress and the Senate have stripped away all financial protections for the
American people. But, hey if you’re a big corp and you’ve just gotten say 500
million dollars from the government (or should I say a loan from the American
people) for a business that goes sour, just file bankruptcy and start all over.
So ‘
we’ as a people (our tax
dollars) loan big business money all the time; but ‘
WE’ have no protections against them.
“Gone is the promise of earlier presidents of a “commitment
to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death,
or old age could leave them or their families destitute.
There is another way the government could find needed funds
without raising taxes, slashing services, or going further into debt: Congress
could re-finance the federal debt through the Federal Reserve,
interest-free.
Canada
did this from 1939 to 1974, keeping its national debt low and
sustainable while funding massive programs including seaways, roadways,
pensions, and national health care. The national debt shot up only when
the government switched from borrowing from its own central bank to borrowing
from private lenders at interest. The rationale was that borrowing bank-created
money from the government’s own central bank inflated the money supply, while
borrowing existing funds from private banks did not. But even the
Federal
Reserve acknowledges that private banks create the money they lend on
their books, just as central banks do.
For students, at the very least the bankruptcy option needs
to be reinstated, usury laws restored, predatory practices eliminated, and the
cost of education brought back down to earth. One possibility for
relieving the burden on students would be to give them interest-free
loans. The government of New Zealand now offers
0% loans
to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after
they graduate. For the past twenty years, the Australian government
has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect
interest-free loans. The loans in the Australian
Higher
Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the
government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is
indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.
Predatory lenders are keeping us in debt peonage through
misguided economics and bank-captured legislators. We have people who
desperately want to work, to the point of going back to school to try to improve
their chances; and we have mountains of work that needs to be done. The
only thing keeping them apart is that artificial constraint called “money”,
which we have allowed to be created by banks and let out at interest when it
could have been created by public institutions for public purposes, either by
direct issuance or through publicly-owned banks. We just need to
recognize our oppressors and throw off their yoke, and the good times can roll
again.”
Student Loan Forgiveness is not just a novel idea, there are
many who agree, it would become a stimulus for the people of the United States;
and not a stimulus for big corps who do very little for the American people
other than reap huge profits by propagating our consumer-based societies
mind-set.
“Let's forgive loans. Just this once, I promise.
I can guarantee this: Those $200 to $800 monthly checks students are cutting
(or amassing in interest as they continue to defer payment) aren't likely to
get socked away in the drawer.
It will go toward homes for people fortunate enough to already have jobs.
And for those who don't, it will go toward new vehicles and apartment leases in
the cities where jobs do exist.
Because those shackled by debt -- even if by their own cavalier and youthful
irresponsibility -- simply can't pick up and move, to work and contribute to
the economy.
Rather than be marginalized by it.” (
http://daily-journal.com/archives/dj/display.php?id=491124).
Loan Forgiveness, “President Obama signed a bill in 2010 that would see the
so-called forgiveness program expanded in 2014. Under the scheme, eligible
students would see their loan
repayments capped at 10 percent of their
income and written off after 15 years.
Together, Americans over 60 years of age still owe onwards and upwards of
$38 billion in student debt and over ten percent of them are lagging behind on
payments.” (
http://rt.com/usa/news/student-loan-debt-occupy-065/).
An ethical & savvy business approach towards student lending, “Consumer
and student advocates, private loan companies and the higher education
community have all asked Congress to pass legislation that would require
private loans to be certified by the school before a single dollar can be disbursed.
This would provide a crucial opportunity for financial aid offices to identify
borrowers who are at risk of taking on unmanageable debt loads or haven’t
exhausted other financial aid opportunities.” (
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/12/easing-the-pain-of-student-loans/require-colleges-to-review-all-lending).
“That has some economists worrying that federal student
loans could become the nation's next huge financial crisis, like the mortgage
bubble that plunged the U.S. into a recession from which it's still recovering.
Anyone say student loan collection agencies are practicing sub-prime
economics? “If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two
or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev
V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the
federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.
Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to
risky mortgages.
And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary
growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact
deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing
officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and
families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand
for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure
loans, primarily from the federal government.” MSNBC
