green elitism

Lewis Black ranted about it on Comedy Central...celebrities are tryiing to convince us that they can save the world by preaching about their virtuous green lifestyles...Consumerism as the way to liberation, consumerism as the path to political solidarity. Of course they tell us that while we're buying our bamboo shirts, we should be writing to our congressmen, but why is shopping green so much more fun than political analysis -- restriction of Hummers on the streets and more stringent exhaust regulations would go a lot further than my changing my incandscent bulbs to fluorescent (which I am doing anyway)....but I hate being told by Richard Gere and supermodels that they take army showers! It's the new holiness, the new virtue! And check out Treehugger where you can get many ideas for eco-conscious shopping sprees.

I admire the Tillmans and Jessica Lynch

If you haven't seen the testimony, read about it here here .

student loan scandal continued...

Andrew Cuomo on the student loan industry: "``Our investigation has revealed an unholy alliance between lenders and many trusted institutions of higher education. Part of the reason the practices we have uncovered have been able to flourish nationwide over the past several years is because the U.S. Department of Education has been asleep at the switch." From The New York Times `Our investigation has revealed an unholy alliance between lenders and many trusted institutions of higher education. Part of the reason the practices we have uncovered have been able to flourish nationwide over the past several years is because the U.S. Department of Education has been asleep at the switch.''

If you have followed the Sallie Mae scandal, you'll see that the Federal Government was Sallie Mae's biggest backer in the early nineties. Sallie Mae earned $1.95 billion dollars in interest on student loans it made last year.

Here is the very lame proposed "code of conduct" that Congress hopes to pass, "The code would ban lenders from paying colleges in exchange for being designated a preferred lender. It also would ban lenders from paying for trips for financial aid officers and other college officials. Lenders also would not be allowed to pay college employees to serve on advisory boards."

How about not making higher education costs a source of speculative income for carpetbaggers profiting from middle class students yearnings for higher learning?

feeling for my crazy Asian American brother...

don't I know the immigrant trials and tribulations story? The feelings of total humiliation? I remember being rejected by Yale Comp LIt's Ph.D. program...couldn't speak about it for years. Just felt a kind of seething rage and resentment...I was accepted by CUNY's Ph.D. program in French. I couldn't apply to grad school again, the risk of rejection was too great.

I still have lingering feelings of --"I wasn't good enough for that Ph.D. program" that are exacerbated by colleagues' asking "Why did you go to CUNY after Yale?"

Umm...because I only applied to two graduate schools and I couldn't risk another rejection -- psychologically I was too fragile...up until that point, I had done everything right...I was walking a tightrope of symbolic legimitization...Perhaps Cho shot everyone up at Virginia Tech because it wasn't Princeton, where his sister had gone to college...THAT'S how much it means for immigrant parents to have that Ivy League monikor behind which to hide...

yellow person's burden

the minority person who explodes onto the national media scene is always a metonymic stand-in for all other members of her race/ethnicity. This works for the scholarship student as well as the hardened criminal. We never get to be ordinary, and we never get to be singular. This is bad, but is it as bad as some fates? No.

Those of you familiar with this blog know that I am no fan of identity politics demands for "better representation" or for an end to stereotypes. I have always tried to keep my focus on economic justice and to argue that culturalist arguments are distractions from more fundamental relationships of exploitation, but with the Virginia Tech shootings, I am once again reminded of how Asian Americans in the media do affect the everyday lives of Asian Americans.

Ethnicity of Virginia Tech

shooter makes us all deal with "diversity" in a new way...as you can read in the LA Times . Korean-American leaders in LA felt the need to denounce the shootings in Virginia and speak of reconciliation, which just goes to show that Asian-Americans, including Korean-Americans still feel as if we live on the knife's edge of backlash. No white people or more specifically, no white suburbanites apologized for the Columbine shootings. Crazy white people ido not make news like crazy minorities do because there are always so many beautiful, tawdry, heroic white people to distract us. But with so few of my racial confreres in the media spotlight (admittedly there are more today than when I grew up) one psychotic kid can come to stand in for all of us. I myself fell into this kind of thinking when I began speculating about Asian-Americans and mental health...Then I realized, this is ridiculous, think of Oklahoma City -- was there a lot of hand-wringing on the part of rural Americans about undermedicated conspiracy theory addled paranoiacs and their fantasies of destroying the US government?

The bigger question is why some one who had been declared mentally ill was able to buy guns legally. Thirty-two people would still be alive today if Cho had not had access to firearms. That is what is crazy about this whole thing -- American gun laws....

Ban Student Loans....

Here is a more detailed analysis of the economics of student loan wherein according to Ted Rall, "an essential public service like education" has been transformed into "a profit-based loan-shark business creates too much temptation to poorly paid, easily corrupted college administrators and corporate greed monsters alike."

I agree whole heartedly with Rall's point, EXCEPT the point about college administrators being "poorly paid." As far as I can tell, a college administrator makes 30% - 50% more than a college professor. Under the present regime, one cannot be GREEDY enough. As far as I can tell, the more well paid you are, the greedier you become!

As Rall points out, retired Al Lord, CEO of scandal ridden, price gouging Sallie Mae paid himself $225 million over the last FIVE years: there is no cut off point after which one says, I've had enough of the cookie. I'll kick back and give back. Meanwhile, middle class kids pay over $800.00 to financeCarpetbagging IS the name of the game. Let's not cry alligator tears for USC, Columbia and Johns Hopkins financial aid officers, although the level of their profiteering is dwarfed by the greed of those at the top. Everyone can use 100K.

Rall suggests and the ONLY presidential candidate who seems to realize this is John Edwards -- that Banks and private credit agencies should be banned from making student loans to begin with!

Oh, by the way, Student Loan Xpress's corporate parent is CIT group, a former subsidiary of Tyco -- you remember Tyco?

And by the way, to all those out there who have praised Buffet and Gates for their philanthropy, the rich could not give back ENOUGH money as far as I am concerned. They're hoping to put a fig leaf on economic injustice that has taken on gargantuan proportionsm, and the do-gooders are still showing us that ONLY capital can talk and walk...

greed and the $60 billion student loan industry

Everyone has assumed that the student loan industry is a necessary feature of higher education funding, but this simply isn't so. And it simply isn't necessary that private companies as has been recently reported have managed to lobby and bully their way into dominance over federally funded programs. The scandal might focus our outrage on a few specific cases, but it is the general notion of contemporary indentured servitude that middle class students must enter into in order to get their mortarboards that should truly give us pause.

A debt-ridden student body is an anxious student body: student radicalism of the late 60s was largely due to a certain amount of middle class economic confidence. This of course had a sent of contradictory consequences for the student movement, but as the French figured out after 68 that large public universities should be riot proofed by prison like archicteture, the US found out that economic pressure on the middle class was just as effective at preventing students from asking the harder questions.

You've got to be greedier and greedier just to keep up with the Bushes these days that it is very hard to think of activism as a viable extra-curricular activity, especially when you are owing classy outfits like Student Loan Xpress five figures when you get that BA.

student loan scandal

The student loan scandal is so instructive as a parable for our the ethos of Bush II America. The sheer balls of the student loan structure in this country is amazing.

Reagan and Republicans after him (and to a lesser degree Clinton) rip apart Federal support for higher education by gradually reducing the Pell Grant and federal student aid system even as college tuition grows at astronomical rates, but the federal government in order to promote "personal responsibility" encourages students to take out loans to pay for ballooning education bills by paying the interest on these loans while said student is in college. Strangely enough the interest the government is paying to student loan granting agencies such as Citibank is not questioned at all...

And new agencies spring up like this very shady enterprise Student Loan Xpress specializing in student loans, from which Financial Aid officers at Columbia, USC, and Johns Hopkins profited in stock holdings and consultation fees even as they are advising the students at their home institutions to take out loans with -- you guessed it, Student Loan Express. New credit instruments I believe is what it is called and these instruments allow undergraduates to fall into near six figure debt in order to finance a college education that will guarantee them a toehold in the upper middle classes where in order to survive they can ride the razor edge of ethical behavior in order to pay for the lifestyles advertised in the New York Times Magazine.

Higher education has become a profitable racket. Burdening twenty two year olds with crushing debt has turned out to be a very lucrative prospect for University Administrators.

This whole story should shake us to the core, but I am afraid that the ones who should be shaking with rage, our students are not tuning in...

pyjamas in public

People, students in the OC and at UCI like to wear pyjamas and pyjama like clothing in public. To be dressed in a suit when confronting an ugg boot shod, flannel pyjama, or juicy couture wearing Other is be be apprehended as "corporate slave" -- whereas the one in sleepwear enjoys the freedom of dreaming in public, or lolling about in an endless bed.

It's as if rich ladies who shop in clingy velour workout suits and students wearing pjyama bottoms are slothful rebels against a regime of spatial differentiation.

How square to wear day clothes in the day!

How could such people know the pleasures of illicit love, the pleasure of being undressed in the dark when they are at all times ready for bed or the next casual hookup?

belatedly, more on the trouble with diversity...

Unable to keep up with The Valve in terms of topicality, I refer you to its discussion of Walter Benn Michaels' recent book, The Trouble with Diversity or How We Learned to Love Inequality which I read on the grueling r/t from Orange County to Philadelphia where we particpated in this event at Slought with Samuel Weber and Eduardo Cadava.

The event inspiring because of Sam's thinking about "Netwar, Networks and Narrative" from his book Targets of Opportunity which is in its own way, a critique of affirmative action hiring policies called "target of opportunity" policies that "targeted" minority candidates and created jobs for them out of diversity initiative funds.

No one at Slought was impolitic enough to mention this, but it does seem that Weber like Benn Michaels is asking to look again at what diversity means in the wake of its institutionalization.

Benn Michaels makes the argument that class is not a culture, and that cultural differences have usurped class differences as the only ones recognizable to institutions eager to congratulate themselves on the integrity of the meritocratic qualities.

Weber's argument is epistemological and has to do with targeting as a mode of thinking both the future and the other.

While the event was highly worthy, domestic air travel in economy class is pure masochism and makes me want to purchase every gadget in the Sky Mall catalogue in order to make me forget that I have been taken hostage.