Imagine an international currency backed by energy? By a raw material that the entire world needs, not gold – which has hardly any productive use, but whose value is mostly speculative – not hot air like the US dollar. Not fiat money like the US-dollar and the Euro largely made by private banks without any economic substance whatsoever, and which are coercive. But a currency based on the very source for economic output – energy.
For families under age 35, growth of student debt outstrips by far the growth of any other debt source, including mortgage and credit card debt (source).by Gaius PubliusIn America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt.
Europe’s Left has finally renounced the Syriza Party (acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left), as Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise or “Unsubmissive France” calls for Greece’s Syriza booted out of the Alliance of Leftists. Greece’s PM Tsipras of the Syriza Party faux Left is way too far Right!
From January 28 to February 7th my wife and I were in Vieques, Puerto Rico, helping as best we could with recovery from Hurricane Maria, which hit on September 20th, almost five months ago. Help is very much still needed. I don’t think I realized how much that is true until I got home to New Jersey and experienced all of the things I didn’t experience during those 10 days:
Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there’s something radically wrong with our strategy.
This is the second in a two-part article on the debt burden America’s students face. Read Part 1 here.
by Gaius Publius2017 has been an such unusual year in so many ways that its unusuality has masked the ways in which it has been a very usual year, a very more-of-the-same series of months.For one thing, "The Resistance" has gone from being a meaningful idea to something almost seems like it could be added to anything to indicate added value — "Dove soap, now with #Resistance." I've seen "resistance" claims from those who fought
A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality.
― Friedrich Engels
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
One year ago, the news was awash with Billy Willson, a 4.0 GPA student from Kansas State University who decided to drop out of university after his first semester with this Facebook message: “YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will see it some day.” His post is still being shared and there are close to 9,000 comments mounting on this thread.
