997 DAYS THIRD OF nOVEMBER 2021 : debt oh crushing debt and escape and bad credit and financial crisis one after another

So if there were a theme on this rainy early November morning it would be financial ruin which I am quite familiar with through the years.  Running one step ahead of creditors.  Indeed.  I stiffed a loan when in NYC with the union at Columbia University....hang on, before that I remember with disbelief that some credit card company was offering money.  Free money.  Thousands of dollars.  Sure you were suppoesed to pay it back but I looked at it like jesus, if these people are stupid enough to give me money I am going to rob them blind.  Not your typical creditor outlook.  Did I have problems with credit before that?  Not that I can remember.  Other than student loans I never intended to pay back because I never intended to take them out but thanks to Ronald cunt Reagan and the end of student finance, the loan was required to finish my shitty half education at Moorhead State in shitty Fargo/Moorhead.  Bleak winter madness.  

How did you get to thinking that?  Oh, student loans and credit to go to study.  What an absurd concept, to have to pay money to get an education that is required to work a decent job for a living.  What a scam.  Just another reminder of shitty republican politics from Peoples World dot org:

In California, Ronald Reagan (who would later become president of the United States) was elected governor of California in 1966 and proposed that the University of California system should charge tuition to attend college. In his words, this was to “get rid of undesirables […] those who are there to carry signs and not to study might think twice to carry picket signs.” His was a campaign to maintain white supremacy by making public colleges and universities cost money. Reagan succeeds and by the 1990s, every “formerly public” school began being paid for by tuition costs, which in turn turned into student debt. This was a slap in the face to those who were protesting white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism because it put these folks in debt.

As a result, the student debt crisis ensued. Student debt quadrupled between 2004 and 2019 to now a whopping $1.6 trillion dollars! The average student debt from people graduating in 2018 was $30,000 with an onset of one million new defaults on student loans each year. To sum it up, from 1964 to 2019 tuition costs soared by 3,819% thanks to Ronald Reagan.

“This mass indebtedness has profoundly deepened the pre-existing racial and gendered inequalities in the United States,” says Appel. This is a result of the systemic disparities from predatory inclusion and racial capitalism. Predatory inclusion is where the financial actors offer needed services to Black and brown households but on exploitative terms that limit or eliminate their long-term benefit.

Anyway in essence, what was promised was taken away you remember sticking you in the fucked up situation of having to ask your parent to do their fucking job and pay for your tuition.  

The Washington Post even confirms it noting that "In 1981, the Reagan administration, with a coalition of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, pushed through Congress a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures."

No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid. Spending on higher education was slashed by some 25 percent between 1980 and 1985. In raw dollar figures, cuts totaled $594 million in student assistance and $338 million in Pell grants. Students eligible for grant assistance freshmen year had to take out student loans to cover their second year. For middle-class families, eligibility was changed as well. Low-cost, low-interest, subsidized federal loans were limited to families with household incomes of less than $32,000, regardless of family size.

So, aha, I find a flaw in my diatribe, not surprisingly.  I was ALREADY taking federal government money to pay for school since my parents weren't paying for it and how else, other than flipping burgers part time in Wendys while going to school full time was I going to fund my education?  Precisely as the article illustrates, in my freshman year I could go to school with aid from the government and by my second year oops, they yanked it all out from under me.

This sort of bullshit is precisely the basis for not giving a fuck about banks and debt and why, when my first credit card offer came in the mail, I leapt at it.  I must have managed at some point to make payments but as soon as I racked up enough debt I would have taken out more and more and then bolted on the entirety of it.

Fast forward to NYC and who knows how I was getting by - on mere salary?  Living within my means because I was living alone and not in Paris encouraged initially into my spending and pleasure additions, heretofore limited to my bi-weekly binges and trips to travel, 

In any case, I was working at Columbia University translating 18th century German theses and to my shock and horror, having to pay Union Dues for a Union I didn't even care about or need.  I had a salary and that was enough I didn't need some cunts to represent me, some extortion racket to pretend to be in my interests.  

By then I was living in NYC with Shari, sharing a flat for a small amount of money.  I knew I was leaving for Europe and quitting my job so right before leaving I took them up on an offer for a loan (from the union) figuring I should get something for my troubles.  Bam, fuck them, another loan never to be paid back.  Mind, back then it was a bit easier, the networks of collection were not what they are now, this police state of debt collection.   There was some point I remember living in NYC perhaps later but in any case, the student loan people had finally caught up with me.  According to my theory which is not backed by evidence, the student loan people only caught up with me because I'd been dumb enough to file income tax (a joint acct for the first time being married, trying to do the right thing) and in doing so, magically appeared on the records again.  Apparently, for years, constantly moving changing addresses and never filing taxes (because you earned beneath the amount required which may or may not have been true, I didn't give a fuck, not giving money to a government that works against my best interests...)

Imagine that, you only pay taxes to a government you support.  Imagine that in America it would mean maybe 40% tax payment rate or less.  

Anyway, what was point?  I took out loan after loan and did not pay anything back eluded capture, eluded creditors, yes, keeping it all under the radar, keeping myself under the radar which in and of itself, now that I think about it, was quite a little escape act.  I must have kept that up who knows how much time?  Until I was in my mid or late 30s it seems.  Never filed taxes again after that debacle, never put myself back on the radar and for all the government knows, I'm dead or disappeared off earth.  (Now that I think about it, even lied to my own bank here in France when they tried to get me to sign up for some bullshit American law requiring French banks to give up client information for American citizens which I also disagree with nobody consulted me so fuck them all, just lie on the forms because I can since I use a British passport not an American one for identification purposes.

And I spent all that time in England - funded in great part in the beginning because me and Shari were sharing funds that she in essence stole from banks offering her loans in America that she applied for and took with zero intention of ever paying anything back.  And even when I broke up with her (I didn't break up with her, I just moved away from her and then commited some near domestic violence and nobody spoke to one another again, she ended up taking up with Binzi from the village and you had pretty much extracated yourself from her life and what fucking difference does it make now since she is bitter and crazy in her old years and all those years we spent together hardly in marital bliss but as adventurers at least) and moved to Bristol to live on my own (which was hardly a miserable experience even though you seem to imagine that it was in my memory muscle but I was  playing in bands and socialising and I did not necessarily feel like an all alone loser...) even then, I was living well in fact, had savings, no loans and THEN I met Kattia and from that moment on, debt was my middle name.

I escaped who knows how much debt in England, maybe 20 thousand maybe 30 thousand who knows.  Ran that credit sky high, living large, living like a rich person lives which quite frankly, should be my right as far as I can tell you know why?  Because rich people are either doing nothing or stealing or killing or exploiting or had done.  Not all rich people mind but the majority of people born into wealthy families are at an unfair advantage and the way that wealthy family became wealthy is in all likelihood through stealing or exploting other people, poor people.  This is capitalism and before that there was at least some sort of meritocracy based upon battle performance for the King or whatever and now it is just who can be the biggest cunt and the reward for being the biggest cunt is having enough money to spend as you like without worrying about debt and THIS is how I lived, as if I had been born into that privilege, the illusion of wealth created by credit and the way I see it, everyone should be entitled to this same illusionary wealth in the form of forgiveable credit but this is not reality of course and you and I and everyone has to close their eyes and pretend and you know why?  Because otherwise you would be going through your entire life living on some shit budget simply because you weren't born into a rich family.

So this is my way of taking what I believe is rightfully mine.  Stealing from banks.  Not at gun point jesse james but through credit.  Not through fraud either just credit. 

But as you advance in years I am testing the limits of it all.  Running low as I run low every year, as I have run low and tried to pull myself out as if by magic and I thought I'd been doing grand all through Covid but in reality, yes it was merely prolonged.  Two years instead of one years's grace, always reorganising my credit until there is nothing left.  Hopefully I will have another go and another but nobody knows.  Thus, I am at my rope's end.  

**

Move on to Habermas calmly.  

"...politicall journalism and the spread of reading societies, salons, and coffee houses into a Bildungsroman of this "child of the eighteenth century." He notes the contradiction between the liberal public sphere's constitutive catalogue of "basic rights of man" and their de facto restriction to a certain class of men."

And that is what history is about in large part I think, wrestling rights and money away from the selfish fucking few who want to have it all and keep it all for themselves.  Wrestle a few rights back and eventually, these parasites (because they milk more from the system in unpaid taxes than however much is paid out in social benefits, it fucking dwarfs in fact, social payouts, those free handouts in unpaid taxes to the rich) 

ThiS is my justification, if I were being sentenced for debt, that my debt is every man's debt or any man brave enough to risk financial ruin instead of silently suffering year after year, living hand to hand mouth to mouth.