How GOP Loyalty to Big Donors Is Harming Everyday Americans

Big news coming from the Trump regime: GOP Next week, 1.8 million student loan borrowers presently in default are under attack by their very own government, according to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the billionaire-ex-wrestling-executive, and as was recorded by How We Fight Back.

They note that McMahon was bragging about how she would be going after Americans who are financially distressed in an op-ed in the April 21 Wall Street Journal:

“On May 5, we will begin the process of moving roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default. Borrowers who don’t make payments on time will see their credit scores go down, and in some cases their wages automatically garnished,” McMahon wrote.

This raised always the vital question:

Is it time for some reparations toward student loan borrowers and health insurance payers?

Bankers and insurance companies should compensate for the damage that they have inflicted on our middle class. Whatever few trillions did exist in debt-the people of America never wanted a few trillions-which were dumped on them by the Republicans since Reagan.

Earlier this week a totally deranged right-winger called in my radio/TV program and gave one of those breathless rants about how if Biden’s forgiving of billions of dollars in student loans is to stand (some of them Trump is challenging), then he wanted a piece of the pie in the tuition loan he already paid.

His attack on Biden’s program to wipe out student debt (which six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court pretty much gutted) went through every tired GOP talking point:

“It is not right that I had to pay for my education and these people are going to get theirs for free.”

I accused him of well-meaning rightist propaganda poisoning and even asked him whether he was tripping or on drugs, but there lies a deeper truth beneath that misplaced rage, a truth that obviously never occurred to him, cluttered though his poor mind might be with Fox News rhetoric.

That truth? There is no crippling student debt, nor are there any trillions in medical debt, in any other advanced Anglo-Canadian or European or Latin American democracy on Earth.

In every other industrialized nation, the citizens of the country are ensured inexpensive access to health care services and education. In more than half of the world’s democracies, healthcare is virtually free, and students are provided stipends for attending college.

Because this is what is best for a democracy and the economy.

Our experience with the G.I. Bill taught us that for every dollar put into a college education for young people, it returns seven dollars in extra lifetime tax revenues and builds the intellectual and social infrastructure of the country.

Likewise, Toyota picked Canada over the United States for a factory location because healthcare systems would charge them thousands of dollars per car in expenses, while instead, prohibitively expensive health insurance and clinical debt renders us sub competitive and dampens opportunities for entrepreneurs.

The dawn of Reaganism changed everything on the American landscape. Healthcare and education became the new gold, while the Republican Party, with Ronald Reagan leading the march, sold its soul to corporate interests. Illegal bribes, culturally baptized as “campaign contributions,” disguised since the days of Nathaniel Macon, have poured in from banks, fossil-fuel companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.

The compromise was that legislators would pass through policies that have drained the working Americans’ resources now for two generations.

In the mid-60s, I paid tuition, room, and board with my part-time weekend jobs at Bob’s Big Boy and Esso station, which stood just in front of me across Towbridge Road in East Lansing. I washed dishes and pumped gas and still could afford a car-a used one, that was, and go out to eat. Try that today!

In the 1970s, when the business that Terry O’Connor

I had started went to 18-employee size, we bought free health insurance for all of them. Why? Because we could pay for it in those days: Michigan, like most states until the Reagan Revolution, required hospitals and health insurance companies to operate as nonprofit corporations. An unusual idea, really!

During Reagan’s time, deals paid for by bribes were forged with the health insurance and banking industries that would see American families financially crushed by astronomical healthcare fees, while the bankers were making billions off desperate student borrowers, who could now afford to lose a few percentages from the top that would get recycled with the blessings of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court as “campaign donations” and gifts to GOP candidates.

Since then, Republicans have been reinstituting these schemes. George W. Bush rendered student loans impossible to discharge through bankruptcy (arguably the most profitable product bankers have ever witnessed) and started the privatization of Medicare thanks to the Medicare Advantage scheme.

These attacks on the working class of America are precisely why over fifty trillion dollars have been confiscated from the kierras and placed into money bins and offshore accounts of the extremely wealthy since Reagan was sworn into office in 1981.

Now is a moment not only to fix this rigged system and to make amends with the American people, in other words, time for reparations to the most glaring victims of Reaganism.

Insurance and banking industries have gorged infinitely more — on the order of hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions — in profits from these twin crimes against America’s working class. These obscene profits do not, and should not exist in this or any democratic nation on Earth, at least never to have been extracted from us after 44 years of plunder.

Like any reparations, implementation is complicated:

• Should the insuring and banking industries issue stock to Americans drowning in student or medical debt?
• Should those overpaid CEOs give back the billions they have stolen from the American people?
• Should the government break up these behemoths, sell them off, and then use the proceeds to make Americas whole?
• Is a “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” necessary for such facilitation, gathering confessions from these industries whose practices have verifiably caused the death of many Americans and devastated countless more?

There must be some justice somewhere on these scales.

Until very recently, Americans had been laid to sleep, believing that Reagan’s neoliberal policy had benefited them. For years, billionaires and industries colluded with the GOP to bleed the agony out of the common man.

For instance, the fossil-fuel industry should at least be helping FEMA rebuild communities devastated by climate change they have created through denial. Next, Musk and Trump are out to destroy FEMA to worsened plight of Americans.

Remember, homes that in 1960 cost two annual salaries now cost ten times the median income? This is because we allow Wall Street to turn housing into an investment vehicle.

Remember when medicines were cheap before Reagan shut down antitrust law enforcement in 1983, after which Big Pharma monopolies bought politicians?

Remember when interest on credit cards was capped at 10%, before the banks captured Nixon and the Supreme Court?

The damage of Reaganism has been widespread and extensive, and student and medical debt — those twin abominations — are just about the right place to start making things right.

Americans have been bled dry for too long; it is high time these parasites get ripped off our backs to reinstate the civilized world. This would be making it right for the rest of us afterward.

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