education Archives - The Consumer Trap
Blowing Bubbles at School
Monday, June 26, 2017 Tuesday, April 12, 2011 by Michael Dawson
Economic bubbles are a logical by-product of an epoch in which capitalists are always right. In conventional, supply-side economics, the one and only possible explanation for any problem with the operation of the overall economy is the claim that the rich still don’t have enough money to unleash the economic boom they and their lackeys are always promising.
As they get even more money, the fact remains that, despite the constant claims to the contrary, a shortage of capital has never been the source of any economic crisis within corporate capitalism, a system that generates chronic problems of effective demand, not of too little money at the top.
As the supply of buyers for potential new products remains stagnant or shrinks, the growing over-supply of investment-seeking wealth at the top of the economic pyramid has no productive place to go. Hence, it flows into one or another scheme for making money with little or no investment in hiring new workers. Money chases money, and bubbles, our age’s cutesy term for ultimately baseless financial rackets, inflate and eventually pop.
The latest bubble? Student loans.
Yesterday’s New York Times reported:
Like all other bubbles, the whole thing is being pushed as a magical answer to “our” economy’s worsening failure to come anywhere close to decently employing everybody who wants a job, as if getting a college degree (or being trained to fix windmills or empty bedpans) in itself creates a new job. Now, that’s bubblicious.
It will be interesting to see if the next decade’s unemployed college grads pick up enough knowledge and courage along with their debt burdens to actually step up and challenge the decrepit overclass still running this stumbling, crumbling society.
Categories Bad Products, Corporate Capitalism Tags debt, education 1 Comment
Categories A Culture of..., Corporate Capitalism Tags education, social class 3 Comments
Sunday, May 9, 2010 by Michael Dawson
Zerobama, addressing graduation at an historically black college, says:
By any number of different yardsticks, African-Americans are being outperformed by their white classmates, as are Hispanic-Americans. Students in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities, no matter what skin color.
In the real world, the second sentence completely explains the facts described in the first. Thanks to white supremacy’s long-standing centrality in the nation’s affairs, whites are disproportionately represented in the higher strata of the class pyramid. Racial outcomes are class outcomes, in things like education, for the all-too obvious reasons, cardinal among which is our system of unequal school funding.
Zerobama, of course, merely tacks on the second sentence, however, in order to divert attention from the racial mystification conveyed by his first statement.
And the answer to the supposedly racial “achievement gap”? Nationalize and equalize school funding? Radical redistribution of economic wealth? Universal public pre-school? Doubling education spending?
Nope. Turns out black people with college degrees have to be such shining examples that all social structure and history and poverty will become irrelevant:
[A]ll of you have a separate responsibility — to be role models for your brothers and sisters, to be mentors in your communities and, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children.
Let them eat values!
Categories Bad Products Tags class, education, Obama, race 4 Comments