11-14-2015: Is This The Last Tango for Neocons?

Is This The Last Tango for Neocons?

When in college my concerns were focused on the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights movement. Earth Day was not yet invented. There was the draft and Black America was burning over the assignation of MLK. I reach back in my memory to the feelings of alienation from the society my parents’ generation had created. They were born just before the first great world war and survived the global flu pandemic, the great depression, and the second world war. They helped create the New Deal. They believed in good government. Over the following thirty years they slowly became Nixon-Reagan Democrats. But not before giving us easy access to inexpensive college. 

I am not much different now than I was then, an outsider looking in. I choose a private school because of its promise of a traditional liberal arts education. My college debt stayed with me for ten years. Manageable, it was not a inhibitive sum. I find it interesting that a few presidential candidates have talked about paying off their student debt as preparation of their campaign. 

The debt students are now taking on is a substantial drag on our economy. Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute has been suggesting for years now that the Federal Reserve provide a stimulus to our economy by purchasing all student debt. A social equity quantitative easing for the rest of us, not just the big banks. The $1.2 Trillion would be less than what was used to recapitalize the financial sector since 2008. This money would mostly go directly into Main Street’s economy. The Fed’s QE1 through QE3 have exacerbated inequality while providing only a modest stimulus effect. 

I don’t regret my riotous youth, except for not being able to counteract the Nixon-Reagan backlash. Today students are facing years of indentured servitude to a system that is dynamically pursuing the destruction of civilization through the destruction of the climate. Our parents were able to reject the social movements of the Baby Boomers. They were part of an ever increasingly economically inclusive society. They had their experience of successful governmental programs.  

I hope that Baby Boomers, unlike our parents before us, will embrace these new youthful movements at next years’ polls. The Student Debt, Black Lives Matter, Immigrant Rights, and environmental and anti-war movements are coalescing in an economy that is becoming more exclusive. The ‘masters of the universe’ will again try to divide our generations as they did 40 years ago. But Baby Boomers, who accepted a doubling of the payroll tax for most of our working lives to support our parents retirement, would be wise find common cause with today’s youth.