The Not-so-hot Knobs of Wall Street
Posted: October 21, 2011 Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent! 40 CommentsThe story so far: Some idiot decides to photograph attractive women demonstrating in Occupy Everywhere events. They probably think they’re part of a narrative on all the great ideas happening in the movement.
What he publishes on youtube is something he calls “Hot Chicks of Wall Street.”
Okay. So far it’s just a bog-standard sad tale of a male who says he has no idea how revolting he is. Jill wrote about it. Now comes the bad part.
Does everyone in Occupy Wall Street rise up to say That Is Not Cool? To say that the knob is no longer welcome in any part of the movement? To ask everyone in it not to give the tripe any air? To affirm that women and men are partners in the movement, not decorations rated on fuckability?
No.
Instead there are complaints about how it’s not an official video from the officially official representatives of OccupyWallStreet so it doesn’t count. (E.g. comments here.) It’s just some lone jerk. He’s no part of the “brand.”
Really? Here’s MarketWatch, not a site otherwise much concerned with OWS. This, however, did catch their eye. (click to enlarge) 
You know what? OWS didn’t officially kick him out. And don’t tell me, “It’s leaderless. There are no officials.” If the video doesn’t count because it’s not official, then there’s somebody who could officially repudiate it. You can’t have it both ways. Now the knob’s work is the mainstream face of OWS. Deal with it.
Furthermore, the knob is getting plenty of air. So much so that Jill had to write a follow-up post about his rape jokes.
Did OWS shut down the jerks whining about how this is nothing but healthy men liking healthy sex and you just have no sense of fun?
No.
They could have pointed out that women like sex too. That doesn’t mean everyone has to listen to endless talk on the size of men’s packages. You keep that stuff to yourself, and to your partner(s). And if you’re a rude jerk to the 99% — any of the 99% — they could have said they don’t want you in the movement.
Then it gets steeply worse. There have been reports of rapes. Did OWS affirm strong support for the women in their ranks, and provide what they could in the way of medical, legal, and police resources?
No.
One group said such reports should go through an OWS committee of some kind, which would vet it for report-worthiness. If they passed it, then it was okay to go to the police.
Uh, hello? Earth calling Dude Nation. Those are the tactics of KBR. They were the military contractors in Iraq who imprisoned a worker after she’d been gang-raped to prevent her from talking about the crime. OWS isn’t imprisoning anyone, but they do seem more worried about reporting than they are about the crime. The tactics differ in degree, not in kind. That is wrong.
Apparently, the official officials at OWS don’t know that. Apparently, they can’t figure out that the way to have enough credibility to fight false accusations of rape is to take the crime seriously. Because I suspect that’s the real issue. They’re terrified of fabricated charges being used to discredit the whole movement.
So they’ve decided to beat everyone else to the punch and discredit the whole movement themselves.
Don’t try to tell me these are just individuals who don’t represent the movement. If they don’t represent the movement, then tell me this:
Where is the outrage shutting them down?
Running for President as a Moneymaking Scheme
Posted: October 20, 2011 Filed under: abortion rights, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, book promotion, Herman Cain, motivational speaking, Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidates, Sarah Palin, self-aggradizement 16 Comments
candidate or conman?
We live in an increasingly shallow and commercial culture, so I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked to learn that some people run for President of the United States specifically in order to enrich themselves rather than because they want to serve our country. To be honest, I’ve often speculated that Obama wanted to be President so he could move up to the investor class, and that he might even prefer to serve only one term and then get on to the business of becoming filthy rich.
Sarah Palin became a celebrity by running for Vice President, after which she resigned her job as governor of Alaska, wrote a couple of books and became a Fox personality. She continued to allow her deluded supporters to believe she intended to run for President in 2012, and then pulled the rug out from under them. Did she do all this just to get rich?
Newt Gingrich’s entire campaign staff resigned in June, reportedly because they felt he was more committed to promoting the books and movies he produces with his wife Calista than to doing the hard work needed to win presidential primaries.
It appears Herman Cain is another example of the largely self-interested, phony presidential candidate, according to an article by Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek.
Green writes that Cain’s occupation over the past fifteen years has been traveling around the country as a “motivational speaker.” He is also promoting his new book, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House while he is supposedly running for President–and presumably accepting contributions from supporters. Green writes that Cain recently told an audience in Phoenix, AZ that “My American dream,” he boomed, “was, when I grow up, I want to make me some money!” More from the article:
Cain is making money, alright. Bloomberg News reported on Oct. 17 that his campaign paid more than $65,000 to his personal publishing company to buy copies of his books and pamphlets. In an interview before his address to the Arizona GOP, he told me that he continues to give motivational speeches to corporations at $25,000 a pop even as he campaigns for President. “I’m still doing paid speeches,” he confirmed. “But I have not raised my prices. This economy’s on life support, so I’m very mindful of those companies that would like to have me come and speak. But I’m not gonna take advantage of my newfound popularity just to put more dollars in my pocket.” Even so, Cain estimates that he has earned $250,000 this year through his speeches.
Running for President has been good to him, even if no one is certain that the White House is his most coveted destination. Opponents, reporters, and many of his own aides are skeptical. In June, four of his top staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire quit because, as one of them put it, Cain “wasn’t willing to make the commitment to Iowa necessary to win.” Over the past few months, as his popularity has swelled, he has turned his back on the early primary states he once courted diligently and set off on a national book tour to promote This is Herman Cain! He has a bare-bones staff, a thin calendar, and hasn’t registered his name on the ballot in numerous primary states, although he has registered appearances on the Today show and dozens of others to pitch his book.
Cain claims he’s a serious candidate, even though he isn’t making the slightest effort to compete in the early primaries.
Cain insists he’s serious about becoming President and dismisses any suggestion otherwise. “People who criticize me for our strategy, they don’t know what our strategy is,” he says. Cain claims that he has passed over early primary states to sell books and speak to audiences in places like Tennessee and Ohio because he is running primary and general election strategies at the same time. “I have an unconventional campaign,” he says.
Nevertheless, by pretending to be a candidate, he has certainly raised his own visibility and celebrity, just as Palin did. I always had the impression that Cain was nothing but a cheap huckster; but after reading Green’s article my opinion of him has gotten even lower, if that’s possible. And yet this man is currently the Republican frontrunner. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t fit in this new America at all. What has happened to patriotism and idealism?
I’ve started seeing a few stories suggesting that Cain’s support may have peaked. Jonathan Bernstein at the Plum Line asks if Cain’s fifteen minutes are over.
Last night, Herman Cain made a big splash when he backed into pro-choice language on abortion last night on CNN — apparently by accident — when he said he is personally fully against abortion but doesn’t think that the government should tell women what to do. This is already shaping up as a very big deal. Cain is leading in some polls, so other Republicans may use this slip up to try to take him down, and he’ll have to address it.
In other words, this could mean the end of Cain’s 15 minutes.
Republicans certainly would never nominate anyone who was actually pro-choice, and anti-abortion activists won’t forgive anyone who stumbled this badly on the issue, even if he walks it back back (as I expect he will) and clarifies that he misspoke himself and he’s actually 100% pro-life. So this is at the very least a severe blow to his campaign. Given that he’s not a serious candidate, it gives Republicans a clean shot at bashing him for long enough to finally remove him from the top of the polls. As such, it can be seen as a lucky break for Republicans who know that it’s really not a good idea to have a presidential candidate who can’t manage to put three sentences together on most topics without an embarrassing gaffe.
At the right-wing Boston Herald, Wayne Woodleif writes that is “already deflating” because of another embarrassing gaffe:
The air is gushing out of Herman Cain’s balloon in the Republican presidential race after his rivals battered his beloved 9-9-9 tax plan Tuesday night in Las Vegas and the former pizza mogul, co-leader in recent polls, made a huge gaffe on terrorism in post- and pre- debate interviews.
In the debate, Cain had brushed off CNN moderator Anderson Cooper’s question of why the candidate had told Wolf Blitzer in an earlier interview that he would consider negotiating the release of all the terrorist detainees at Guantanamo for the return of a single American held hostage (a la Israel’s deal with Palestine). “I would never negotiate with terrorists,” Cain answered.
But when Cooper, post-debate, played video from the earlier interview, Cain was caught clearly saying, “I could see myself as president authorizing that kind of transaction.” Once he had all the facts, Cain sang a different song. “I misspoke,” he said. “Things were going so fast” in the interview.
So Cain may soon join Palin as a Fox News Host or perhaps become a more high-profile talk radio host than he was before he “ran for President.” But whatever he chooses to do, he’ll be a lot richer and more famous because pall the free media exposure he received while pretending to be a serious candidate.
Am I the only one who finds that deeply disturbing?
Thursday Reads
Posted: October 20, 2011 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Calvin and Hobbes, Democratic National Convention 2012, Frank Lautenberg, Hispanic voters, immigration, occupy Wall Street, Philadelphia dungeon case, Republican presidential candidates, riot control, WPA 38 Comments
Good Morning!! I’ve got some widely disparate reading material for you today. I’ll begin with some articles related to the growing Occupy movement.
The New York Review of Books has posted an depth piece (just about all their articles are long and in-depth) by Michael Greenberg about Occupy Wall Street. I won’t try to excerpt from it, but think the article is a useful summary of the history of the movement and the author’s conversations with the organizers and protesters.
Raw Story has an interview with Chris Hedges: ‘Corporations have carried out a coup d’état in my country.’ Here’s some of what Hedges had to say:
“I spent 20 years overseas, I’m a war correspondent,” he said. “I came back and realized that corporations have carried out a coup d’état in my country.”
“I covered the street demonstrations that brought down Milošević, I’ve covered both of the Palestinian intifadas, and once movements like this start and articulate a fundamental truth about the society that they live in, and expose the repression, the mendacity, the corruption and the decay of structures of power, then they have a kind of centrifugal force, you never know where they’re going.” ….
“What happens, and it’s true in all of these movements as well, is the foot soldiers of the elite, the blue uniform police, the mechanisms of control, finally don’t want to impede the movement. At that point, the power elite is left defenseless. So, where’s it going? No one knows. Even the people most intimately involved in the organization don’t know. All of these movements take on a kind of life and color that in some ways is finally mysterious. The only thing I can say, having been in the middle of similar movements, is that this one is real … And this one could take ‘em all down.”
That’s quite a recommendation from a genuine radical.
It appears that the administration is getting nervous about what kinds of protests they might see at the Democratic Convention next year. The Charlotte Police are currently being trained to handle riot control, and the equipment and training are being paid for by the Federal Government.
Almost every one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s 1,700 officers are going through three days of intensive riot training. Police allowed Channel 9 a behind-the-scenes look at how they’re doing it.
“It’s a very controlled, measured response with a lot of practice,” Deputy Chief Harold Medlock said….
It’s all very carefully choreographed. There’s a reason, for example, why they would move half a step at a time toward a group of protesters.
“The point of some of the tactics and the maneuvers that we use is to allow folks to have the time to do what we’re asking them to do,” Medlock said.
Chanting is part of the plan, too.
“We want them to hear us as we move and do the things that we need to do, so you’ll hear a lot of verbalization from our officers and one of the things you’ll hear is, ‘Move back!’” Medlock said.
Apparently the riot training will also prepare police to deal with Occupation Charlotte.
Just another day in Police State America….
I’ve been watching a lot of Criminal Minds reruns while I’ve been sick recently. Tonight after I watched a couple of episodes, I came across this story from Philadelphia that could have come from that show. It seems too horrible to be real, but it is. Over the weekend four disabled people were found confined in a “dungeon.” Police suspect that the perpetrators were kidnapping disabled children and adults and keeping them locked up in order to collect their disability checks.
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said that wounds found on Beatrice Weston — the 19-year-old niece of the alleged ringleader of the operation, Linda Ann Weston — were the worst he had ever seen on a person who was still alive.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in a living person,” Ramsey said. “It’s remarkable that she is still alive. There is no penalty that is too harsh for the people that did this.”
Beatrice Weston, who had been reported missing in 2009, suffered wounds that included healed-over fractures, pellet gun wounds, and burns from heated spoons. Beatrice was also malnourished.
“The word horrific is not sufficient,” Ramsey said.
Ten children and teens were taken into protective custody Tuesday night, ranging in age from 2 to 19, reportedly near the apartment building in Philadelphia’s Tacony neighborhood, where the four original victims were discovered Saturday morning.
Authorities say there may be 50 more victims in the case, based on documents taken from Linda Ann Weston when she was arrested.
Hispanic voters may be angry with President Obama for deporting so many people, but the Republican candidates aren’t exactly endearing themselves to immigrants either.
Today, Republican candidates are competing over who can talk the toughest about illegal immigration — who will erect the most impenetrable border defense; who will turn off “magnets” like college tuition benefits.
But after such pointed proposals heated up yet another Republican debate, on Tuesday night, some party officials see a yellow light signaling danger in battleground states with large Hispanic populations in November 2012. Will Hispanic voters remember and punish the eventual Republican nominee?
“The discussion of creating electrified fences from sea to sea is neither prudent nor helpful,” said Ryan Call, chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, where Hispanics cast 13 percent of votes in 2008 and helped President Obama flip the state to blue. “They’re throwing red meat around in an attempt to mollify a particular aspect of the Republican base.”
You’d think with all the awful problems facing this country, the Republicans could find better issues to run on than picking on undocumented immigrants and pregnant women.
The NYT editorial board has this to say about the cruel new anti-immigrant law in Alabama that Minkoff Minx has written a great deal about.
Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, the nation’s harshest, went into effect last month…., and it is already reaping a bitter harvest of dislocation and fear. Hispanic homes are emptying, businesses are closing, employers are wondering where their workers have gone. Parents who have not yet figured out where to go are lying low and keeping children home from school.
To the law’s architects and supporters, this is excellent news. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has a side career of drafting extremist immigration legislation for states and cities, notoriously in Arizona and now in Alabama.
Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.
The pain isn’t felt just by the undocumented. Legal immigrants and native-born Alabamans who happen to be or look Hispanic are now far more vulnerable to officially sanctioned harassment. Many of those children being kept home from school by frightened parents are born and bred Americans.
More evidence that American is becoming a police state.
Here a little good news for a change: New Jersey Sen. Lautenberg says it’s time for a new WPA
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) isn’t taking last week’s failure to pass President Obama’s jobs package lying down. Instead, he’s got a bolder plan in mind: create a new Works Progress Administration.
“It’s apparent that there’s a lot of need out there, and it’s apparent that there’s a lot of works out there,” he told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. “We’ve got millions of people looking for work,” he added, and his plan has “the immediacy factor” that other plans — including the President’s — lacks….
Lautenberg’s legislation, called the 21st Century WPA Act, wouldn’t be exactly like the WPA that gave Lautenberg’s own father a job during the Great Depression. Rather, it would award funding to projects that would give jobs to people unemployed for more than 60 days; have a continued economic benefit after their completion; and would devote a “high” portion of each dollar spent to employee pay. The legislation suggests — but does not limit departments to — a variety of projects, including the construction of water treatment plants, schools and firehouses, highway repairs and maintenance, building weatherization and trail maintenance.
It probably won’t get past the Republican House, but good for Senator Lautenberg for trying.
I’m going to end this post with a unique depiction of the mind of a Wall Street titan.
That’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?
More Jobs Bills from Republicans!!! Not!
Posted: October 19, 2011 Filed under: abortion rights, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, right wing hate grouups | Tags: right wing extremist, Senator Jim Demint 14 Comments
Would the conversation that we’re having right now be illegal if this Anti-Choice Senator has his way? Does it just refer to doctors who want to discuss women’s reproductive health? Just what exactly does the first amendment mean to right winger Senator Jim DeMint? This should really show how extreme some of the religionists have become in our country. This is something I’d expect to see in oppressive religious regimes like Iran.
Anti-choice Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) just filed an anti-choice amendment to a bill related to agriculture, transportation, housing, and other programs. The DeMint amendment could bar discussion of abortion over the Internet and through videoconferencing, even if a woman’s health is at risk and if this kind of communication with her doctor is her best option to receive care.
Under this amendment, women would need a separate, segregated Internet just for talking about abortion care with their doctors.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called Sen. DeMint’s actions outrageous:
What about a woman experiencing a high-risk pregnancy who is talking with her doctor through video conferencing? Under Sen. DeMint’s extreme plan, if abortion came up in that doctor-patient conversation, the woman and her physician would have to go to a separate communications system. He’s calling for an abortion-only version of Skype. It is impractical, ridiculous, and, most importantly, bad for women in rural or remote areas who would not be able to discuss the full set of options with their doctor.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.358, the “Let Women Die” bill. The House has now voted on more anti-choice measures this year than in any year since 2000.
And now, anti-choice senators are saying, “Me, too!”
I am so outraged about all these interferences in women’s lives, health, and private decisions that I don’t even know what to say. Who says the Republican party hate excessive regulation and government interference in businesses and individuals lives?
Student Loans: Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble
Posted: October 19, 2011 Filed under: education, unemployment | Tags: Sallie Mae, student loan bubble, student loans 15 Comments
I laughed pretty loudly when I opened an email from the university to my faculty account explaining how wonderful the increased retention numbers were looking! Our new funding formula from extortionist governor Bobby Jindal depends on graduating and retaining students. I guess they don’t have economists in that section of administration. Just look at the unemployment rate for the typical student population (16-24 year olds) and the decreasing labor force participation rate from August, 2011. You’ll see exactly what’s going on. Got no job? Where do you go to find money and hopefully place yourself higher up on the meat market ladder if businesses ever go back to hiring?
The number of unemployed youth in July 2011 was 4.1 million, down from 4.4 million a year ago. The youth unemployment rate declined by 1.0 percentage point over the year to 18.1 percent in July 2011, after hitting a record high for July in 2010. Among major demographic groups, unemployment rates were lower than a year earlier for young men (18.3 percent) and Asians (15.3 percent), while jobless rates were little changed for young women (17.8 percent), whites (15.9 percent), blacks (31.0 percent), and Hispanics (20.1 percent).
So, we’ve got the biggest numbers of young people since the baby boom with parents whose employment situation is not great and whose assets and real incomes have taken a major hit over the last ten years. We’ve got kids that can’t even find the usual kid jobs. What are they going to do but go for those student loans and hang at university as long as possible? This brings me to the next big bubble phenomenon–Student Loans–plus the next GSE that’s going to be seeing default rates sky rocket. That would be Sallie Mae.
The $1 trillion of outstanding loans means that Americans now owe more on student loans than on their credit cards. While students have been racking up educational loans, American consumers have been paying down credit cards and home loans.
The average full-time undergraduate student borrowed $4,963 in 2010, up 63 percent from a decade earlier, even after adjusting for inflation, the report says.
Meanwhile, with a greater loan burden, the percentage of borrowers that defaulted on their student debts also rose – from 6.7 percent in 2007 to 8.8 percent in 2009.
That gives a lot of credence to the argument that the next big bubble will be in student loans. Here’s an investor’s view point from seeking alpha from back in July. Should we all start hedge funds and short student loans? Well, for one thing. You can short sell for profit university’s stocks who thrive on churning loans and assume Sallie Mae will be a goner just like its buddies Fannie and Freddie. Dump their bonds and short them!
With the current state of the job market, many if not most of these unfortunate borrowers will not be able to pay off their debt with a lower than expected income. This trend is showing itself through increasing default rates of student loans. Three-year default rates have risen from 11.8% for loans issued in 2007 to 13.8% issued in 2008 (most recent data available). Meanwhile, the fundamental factors driving these defaults have not changed since.
Historically, investors have not worried about the default of these securities because of their explicit government guarantees through FFELP. In addition to this, student loans are the only debt that cannot be forgiven through bankruptcy. Student loan collectors have gone to the extent of garnishing wages and racking up penalties that can double the borrower’s debt in the name of “forgiveness” to maintain a return for bondholders.
This story sounds similar to housing: If the borrowers fail to pay, lenders seize the asset (house for a mortgage, garnished wages for student loans). The story will end the same way, as students lack the income to maintain their living expenses plus the debt or even just the interest payments if they are unemployed. The other option that students will begin to take more is moving abroad to avoid collectors. Financial distress will make it practical to exile oneself to avoid a lifetime of debt slavery. The combination of lower incomes for college grads and expatriation will increase the default rate to even high levels than current record rates.
So how do investors go about shorting the bubble in higher education? Ideally, the best way would be to buy credit default swaps on student loan asset-backed securities, which have a similar construction to the mortgage-backed securities that caused the last financial crisis. However, this strategy is not available to most readers. Average investors are better off short-selling the leading providers of student loans or for-profit universities, which have some of the highest default rates of student loans for any academic institution.
The leading student loan provider in the United States in the Sallie Mae corporation (SLM). It was launched as a government-sponsored enterprise (since privatized) similar to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; it currently services and manages $180.4 billion of government-backed student loan debt. It’s also begun to issue private student loans as well. With a debt to equity ratio of 36, Sallie Mae is already on the edge of insolvency. A small drop in collections can amount to significantly levered losses to the company. If the student loan default rate increases to 20%, Sallie Mae will most likely not be able to survive. The continuing upward trend of student loan defaults will lead to either insolvency of Sallie Mae or a government takeover — which will both wipe out shareholders.
Above the Law even asked if there was any one out there left that even believed that this wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen. How’s this for harsh?
The problem is that our colleges and universities are charging a $100,000 to pump out the next generation of dog walkers. Sure, part of the fault lies with the people themselves; parents who let their 18-year-old children borrow a ton of money to go to an expensive private university to major in art history are no better than strung out crack mothers.
But the dean who sits there and says, “come study comparative literary criticism for the low, low price of $40,000 per year,” is the price-gouging drug dealer. These deans are pushing a product at a price point that they know is dangerous for most of their consumers.
This is what worries me. This is also from Above the Law and it mentions just how married you and yours going to be to that student loan. Not only that, but graduate students will have a much bigger balances to pay in the future thanks to an Obama sell-out on the deficit. Talk about setting people up for loan failure. Why not just pump the least able to pay for more money?
In the total debt ceiling cave-in that will mark Barack Obama as the most successful Republican president since Ronald Reagan, there was one cut that really illustrates how little the president cares for his young, college-educated constituents. To save about $26.3 billion dollars, the debt ceiling deal eliminates the graduate student loan subsidy. That means that law students (and other grad students) will continue accruing interest on their non-dischargeable educational loans throughout their graduate studies.
I can see why they call education the “silver bullet,” because education certainly seems like a surefire way to kill one’s economic future….
The graduate loan cut wasn’t the most ridiculous so-called compromise Obama made while John Boehner was pumping him like Richie Aprile did to Janice Soprano. But it is illustrative of the extent to which Obama has abandoned the young people who helped elect him so that he can court… well, I don’t know exactly what universe he lives in where he thinks a black Republican running as a pro-war Democrat wins a general election
Meanwhile back on the Planet of anecdotal evidence, we get these examples. Ask me about Doctor Daughter’s student loan debt or mine, for that matter. I got two degrees in the late 70’s and early 80s by working and that was it. I just couldn’t swing it this time. I now have student loan debt that would’ve bought me a Mercedes and I’m jobless and on the jobfree labor market. Sallie Mae’s like a loan shark too. They’re worse to deal with than the bookies in my neighborhood.
“I have ~$75k in student loans. I will default soon. My cosigner, my father, will be forced to take my loans. He will default as well. I’ve ruined my family because I tried to rise above my class,” writes one testimonial on the 99 percent website on Wednesday.
The 99 percent website is one of the places where the Occupy Wall Street movement first got its inspiration from.
“I am a young medical professional who BARELY makes it paycheck-to-paycheck because I have OVER $200,000.00 in student loan debt,” says another testimonial on the website Tuesday. “I pay almost $1,000 a month just in student loan repayment. I will have to do so for the next 30-years. How will I ever afford to buy a house, have children, or save for the future?”
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