The New Serfs: Student Loan Slaves

I went to college when you could afford public-school tuition, room, board and books on a full-time minimum wage job. Student loans were for people who went to private school.
I simply cannot comprehend the financial burden graduates face today. But I know what it means.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The student loan crisis isn't just an abomination from a progressive standpoint for all the obvious reasons. It's also horrible from a conservative standpoint. If the objective is to make of every American a self-sustaining, freedom-loving capitalist entrepreneur, saddling them with loans they cannot repay at the beginning of working age is the very worst thing one can do.
If Republicans really believe their rhetoric, they'll do something about it. On the other hand, if their intent is to create a desperate, indentured labor pool struggling just to maintain the facade of a middle class existence while begging for scraps from the corporate table, then doing nothing is a perfect choice.
But I think we already know what they're going to do, don't we? So let's just remember that when conservatives do nothing on this issue, it will be proof that they're not interested in removing barriers to entrepreneurship and capitalist risk taking. They're interested in creating a vulnerable, dependent class of desperate grist for the corporate mill.

It's all coming together for the plutocrats:  a forty-year transfer of wealth and political power from workers to rich parasites; a deliberately-created crisis that sweeps away the remnants of the middle class; unaccountable corporations with unimaginable wealth able to openly buy elections, and lifelong debt burdens to prevent any of the proletariate from accumulating enough power to fight back.

It's the Lords-and-Serfs economy, and it's already here.

It's not about preventing plutocracy any more; it's about overturning and destroying it.