All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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College Loan Debt: Former Students Strike the Wrong Pose

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English: ITT Technical Institute Canton, Michi...
English: ITT Technical Institute Canton, Michigan campus, 1905 South Haggerty Road (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I saw the Bloomberg headline “Former ITT Tech Students Launch Debt Strike” (September 14),  I assumed the students were upset with the US government for effectively shutting down the for-profit educational chain. After all, it occurred to me, there were probably many students left hanging by Washington’s shenanigans. I’d be upset too if I was most of the way through a degree program and government bureaucrats suddenly made it impossible for my school of choice to continue operating.

I was wrong about their reasons, though. The students (some of whom attended Corinthian, another for-profit chain) racked up big-time debt by making poor decisions. Instead of blaming themselves (or, if they were defrauded, ITT or Corinthian) for that debt, they’re blaming the people who loaned them the money they blew:

“We trusted that education would lead to a better life,” the Corinthian debt strikers write in an open letter to the US Department of Education, “And we trusted you to ensure that the education system in this country would do so. … Each month you force us to make payments into an immoral system that profits from our aspirations. … To the Department of Education and to the lenders, servicers, and guarantee agencies who have stolen our futures, we say: enough! Erase these loans.”

Look, I sympathize. As a callow youth, I attended but quickly dropped out of college with some student loan debt. It wasn’t the huge debt a full four-year degree would have entailed, but yeah, it was hard. I fell behind, defaulted and eventually my wages were garnished to pay it off.

But for some reason it just never occurred to me to hold anyone else — the bank, the government, society — responsible for me getting myself into debt.

Yes, the government certainly bears some responsibility for the size of student debt. As then-Secretary of Education William Bennett wrote in the New York Times in 1987,  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase. … Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible.”

So yes, college has become more expensive over the years, resulting bigger debt loads, partly because of government education subsidies. And it may be that that should be taken into account and some of that debt partly forgiven as part of an agenda that ends such subsidies.

But no, the government didn’t make you borrow the money. To reverse president Barack Obama’s adage, if you’ve got a student loan debt — you built that. Nobody else made that happen. Any discussion of fixing it starts with you owning up.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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9/12: The Appeal to National Narcissism is Alive and Well

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September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: V...
September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: View of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. (Image: US National Park Service ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The narcissist,” someone once wrote on an Internet discussion forum devoted to the topic, “learns nothing, forgets nothing, and forgives nothing.”

In conscious appeal to this tendency, the American political class flocks to shrines in New York, DC and Pennsylvania each year to once again cynically wring as much narcissistic flag-waving hoopla as possible from the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I generally avoid watching these observances. This year my sole exposure to them was video of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton collapsing as she left the New York event during a medical emergency.

9/11 will remain American political propaganda’s killer app (pun intended) for many years, I’m sure, but I consider 9/12 and the following few days far more important in the scheme of things. Call ME a national narcissist, but I find the response more compelling than the initiating event.

Fifteen years on, it is clear that America’s political class still relies on Americans having learned nothing, forgotten nothing, and forgiven nothing. That reliance seems justified.

Consider this excerpt from an op-ed I wrote on September 12, 2001:

“Our politicians have acted for years with impunity, citing only our ‘national interest,’ as if any legitimate interest could be served by the intentional killing of civilians simply because those civilians have been designated ‘the enemy’ …

“We watched as those politicians were hustled away to ‘safe houses,’ the better to immunize themselves from the consequences of their own actions of years and decades past. …

“Now, they emerge from their hiding places, and they wail and gnash their teeth, vowing revenge and demanding that we surrender even more of our freedoms in order to avoid more of what they themselves brought upon us in the first place. They regard the blood of September 11 not as a horrible payment for their past errors, but as ink with which to write new checks to the order of their power and drawn on the account of our lives and freedoms.”

Has anything changed since I wrote that column? Not that I can tell.

After 15 years of unremitting exploitation of 9/11 to justify war on our civil liberties at home, and war abroad of the very type that culminated in 9/11, American politicians still believe that all they need to gull the populace into supporting more of the same is, as Joe Biden put it of Rudy Giuliani, “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

They’re right. And until that changes, nothing else will.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: It’s a Presidential Campaign, Not a Geography Quiz

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Former Gov. Gary Johnson
Gary Johnson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On September 8, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where panelist Mike Barnicle hit him with the question:

“What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

Johnson: “About?”

Barnicle: “Aleppo.”

Johnson: “And what is a leppo?”

Barnicle: “You’re kidding.”

Johnson: “No.”

Maybe you’ve heard about this exchange. Maybe you know (or maybe you Googled and found out) that Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and a focal point of the war between Syria’s government and Islamic State rebels.

Be warned: If you listened to MSNBC’s “expert” on Syria, or read the New York Times account of Johnson’s “faux pas,” you got bad scoop. They didn’t know much about Aleppo either, inaccurately describing the city as the Islamic State’s “capital” (that’s Raqqa, not Aleppo).

My gut feeling is that the average American will come down on Johnson’s side of this teapot tempest, for two reasons.

First, most Americans likely know little if anything about Aleppo and don’t care to, so they can probably sympathize. Johnson’s foreign policy focus as a presidential candidate is “big picture.” He wants the US to stop militarily intervening everywhere around the world at the drop of a hat. He doesn’t have to know the name of every city in the world to know that he doesn’t want to bomb them.

Secondly, the question was transparently framed as an ambush. Barnicle’s obvious intent was to try and get a Dan Quayle or George W. Bush type howler or malapropism out of Johnson.

Any TV talking head who queried Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the subject would do so roughly as follows:

“Moving on to Syria: If elected, what is your plan to address the civil war there, destroy ISIS and bring peace to the region? And what do you think of reports of new chemical attacks in the country’s largest city, Aleppo, where fighting between regime forces and ISIS has flared up again?”

Not: “What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

To Johnson’s credit, he quickly owned up to and apologized for his knowledge gap in the area of Syrian geography. But he shouldn’t have had to, because he shouldn’t have been asked that question in that exceedingly unprofessional manner.

Running for president is not a geography quiz.

And Morning Joe isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — an arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, charged with helping her regain traction among voters who have abandoned her for third party candidates because of her demonstrated personal corruption and incompetence, not to mention her dangerous foreign policy belligerence.

Yes, Clinton knows where Aleppo is — and she’d turn the city of more than two million into a lifeless crater given the opportunity.

Is Johnson all that and a bag of chips? Maybe not. But at least his ideas on foreign policy and military adventurism don’t constitute an existential threat to the US and to humanity. The same can’t be said for the ideas of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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