undefined> The loan forgiveness was meant to right the wrongs that happened under republican leadership of these programs.

I remember since the early 90s under no republican leadership the gov guar. student loans were sold over cheap to private banking and collection to collect. Again we are not a liberal crowd here to preach anti-republicanism when real defense and advancement to capitalism is carried out by dixocrats, including a dark-skinned one.

Remember who in the 90s passed legislation to wipe out urban poor housing under no protest no contest in court for 1/3 value offerings, and handed out urban land to developers to beautify and modernize cities? This caused the real-estate boom, the explosion of housing costs, and the transfer of the financial bubble into housing and development, to yet another bubble that blew up and sentenced the entire world to pay off the US financial bubble. It also created the transportation havoc created in nearly all urban/metro areas and had people travel 1-2hrs to get to a reasonably paying job.

We are not liberals or democrats here to preach about what republicans did, as democrats have done no better.

NOT EVERYONE goes to college/university or even extensive technical/trade school that ensures leaping over the “real working class”. Look at the demographics and the percentage of the population reaching “higher education” than HS. The percentage that didn’t, never took out a single loan and after this handout to the “middle class” (it is funny because on another thread I am engaged in someone reacted to the term as I fabricated it and brought it on without theorizing upon) they will end up with no degree and no loan without payment. This will increase inequality.

I am surprised that this escapes you, that a large portion of working class kids never attempted to go to any college because simply they couldn’t afford it.

Just because the conservatives are using it as leverage to manipulate the poor and working class to their advantage doesn’t mean they are wrong on this one. Do you have any clue what it costs to become a physician in this surreal country we are referring to in the cheapest of all state medical school? How many years one must go in debt if have no other support to eventually get a badge that says now I can scoop it all up and make tons of money. Or how rich kids can go to the Carib. private schools and buy themselves an easy degree and compete.

Again, I am not against those that got in debt in getting a waiver, I am in support of all of those that didn’t and now are being pushed further behind in the class difference. If they are going to waive payment to some they should give a cash handout to those that didn’t get a loan because they never went to school.

With the exception of a very few countries like N.Korea, in the remaining world politics are driven around the manupulation of the “middle class”, but I am glad you picked it up and asked the question because my definition is not that vague. The vaguness comes together with the manipulation of the majority of the population thinking they are the middle class politicians appeal to.

Don’t pretend you’ve never heard the term, I know you have, to have an aversion to it is understandable.

What I call middle class is management. Those that definitely don’t have the same interests with workers, they benefit directly or indirectly from the exploitation, but they are not the owners either. They are the ones that have the authority to blackmail you and terrorize you at work to do as they say or you will be fired, or even never get a raise or promotion.

Who is the capitalist class today, does anyone know? How many of us here have seen a true capitalist in the workplace? Very few in very small outifits where the owner is also a manager directly to the low level employees. The owners have vanished, in some cases nobody knows who they might be with large corporation being in the stock market. How can you engage in class conflict when you don’t even see the other class. If you don’t see it, you don’t see the way of life, how do you know they benefit from your exploitation. The vast majority of large corporations/industries today in paper they show as being in deficit, being worth less than they owe. They are in debt, because that is the financial model of a healthy corporation. Although people can make millions from corporations that are in debt.

This is part of the intentional transformation of capitalism that has sentenced Marxists to be less effective or even making any sense to the average worker. Together with the populism of some left wing parties appealing to managers as “employees” or “proletariat” … and things have ended up in this dead end we are locked in.

In the old days you walked long muddy paths to get to the factory and the owner passed with his limo and splashed mud on you, someone opened his door and someone else held an umbrella over his tall hat as he walked to the front entrance of the office of the factory. He was the owner. This picture doesn’t exist for the past 50 years for 95% of industrial workers.

You can work for a McD franchise and the sole owner of a sole shop is there, in reality all he is is a manager for McD that gets paid a portion of the profit when it exists, or zero when it doesn’t, and he is under the illusion he is the owner of the means of production and he can not even buy and use a slice of tomoato in his own means of production. He is just low level management with a really bad (for him) contract to either make money for the boss or work for free. A foreman laying cable for a phone company is higher level manager than the McD owner is.

Dare take it further? Are physicians middle class, college professors, academic researchers with 24 grad students laboring 80h/wk, middle class? Is a plumber with two assistants “the owner of the means of production”?

The working class will never revolt together with their enemies, their managers!

Now wait a damn minute. It is not just the working class that owes loans for schooling, one may say the lowest economic class in the US made the least use of student loans, it is the middle class that benefitted the most. Kids that got out of public school and went straight to work, either in factory, construction, etc. made very little use of those loans. On the other hand some who did get loans may have used them as capital to escape work and are now well off, just didn’t feel like paying.

The populist right invested in this reality and got a significant part of the real working class who never saw a student loan to “rightfully” say if you are going to donate 30-50.000 to others why not give me just as much too?

The neoliberal nightmare (Biden) as brother/comrade Manning Marable called him (in contradiction to the “neo-fascist disaster” Trump) invested in appealing to this lower middle class of managerial stuff and their kids, to give them a gift so he can get elected. And he did probably on this promise for a gift himself. He may have known it wouldn’t legally make it all the way so it was a cheap promise to make. Who knows what’s next from this war-monger constitution abolitionist (covid violations of constitutional human rights).

The 1.2 trillion of fake dollars printed and distributed wasn’t illegal, corporations sucked it all up, but loan wavers are, because they are not for everyone’s benefit.

EDIT: To go to a short term trade school to get a license or certificate within months (such as CDL driver’s license) only costs a few thousands in loans and mostly the payments of were made sortly after by an employer. To go through university and graduate education loans could easily reach 50+ k$, for which an MBA could graduate, start an Inc. consulting/accounting/financing and as a person can have unpaid loans while their business could be bringing millions. Truck driver got 3000, and it was paid 6-9mos after first job. Golf-club life member owes $100k with penalties and interest and doesn’t care, it was government guaranteed and nobody is chasing to throw him in prison.

Isn’t the true pyramid the one with a square base? I think this is called a tetrahedron.

Carters’ peanuts :)

Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.

Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).

Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.

Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.