You get an email ! You get an email !
No, it's not Oprah. It's the Biden-Harris administration!
Many Americans will receive emails from the Biden-Harris administration informing them of a change in the status of their student loans. And that change: Their student loans are history!
Just in the month of March 2024, six billion dollars' worth of student debt was wiped off the books for some 7700 borrowers, according to CBS Moneywatch. "For too long our nation's teachers, nurses, social workers, fire fighters, and other public servants," the US Secretary of Education, Miquel Cardova, declares, "faced logistical trouble and trapdoors when they tried to access the debt relief they were entitled to under the law."
After the conservative Supreme Court blocked President Biden's attempt to forgive student loans across the board, the administration got to work devising another plan. Plan B, to be exact.
According to Vox, Plan B will eliminate student loan debt for those who "now owe more money on their loans than they originally borrowed". In addition, those who "took out loans to enroll in 'low value' academic programs" will receive help. Those who "have owned on loans for at least 20 years", and those who "would qualify for preexisting loan forgiveness programs but aren't enrolled in one right now" will receive emails from the government. Finally, those who are "experiencing financial hardships" will receive relief.
Plan B will allow some 4 million Americans to have "their entire debt canceled". Another "ten million Americans will see at least $5000 of relief". Others will have "their interest accrued". But, of course, this kind of compassion doesn't sit well with fascists who see no reason for lazy people to receive help from the government. The government for fascists is there to send money up to the corporate warmongers. Better to enhance a weapons defense program with more drones and jet fighters than to assist Americans struggling with student debt.
So the fascists are screaming bloody murder, shaking their fists, apologizing to their friends in the corporate world and assuring them that the US will get back on track, back to a cruelty-wins-all society!
I graduated with a BA in English in 1977, a semester later than anticipated. I had a heart catheter after my first semester to determine what beta blocker would allow me to pursue a degree without running out of energy between classes. I had to learn to stay silent about this heart condition. Or else. Preexisting condition would keep me out the job market. Or, at least, away from writing in a newsroom or teaching in a classroom.
I also graduated with a loan.
In my first years, I had a scholarship; however, in my last year, I had nothing. Young siblings were back at home, attending Catholic schools. My mother was working "under the table" to pay on their tuition. I was the first to attend college, and I was determined not to become a college drop out.
My first job was with the Chicago Sun-Times, where I worked as a copy clerk. However, I didn't last long. I suffered a tachycardia episode right in the newsroom. I called home, and my mother came and took me to the hospital where I stayed for a day or two. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, more than a little suspicious, removed me as an insurance holder, and warned that I was never again to apply for insurance with them. A young 22-year-old hospitalized and seeing a cardiologist--something was amiss.
I wasn't at the newspaper long enough to establish any payment plan. Besides, the pay wasn't enough to rent a small one-bedroom.
I headed for California.
Every silly telemarketing job and every file clerk position I applied for and received minimum wages. I ate candy bars. Sometimes I took two beta blockers per day when I should have taken three. Sometimes, one a day. Sometimes no beta blockers until pay day--a week or two later. It was hard to set an appointment to see the cardiologist when I couldn't afford one. But Walgreens insisted, and I made arrangements to pay on my cardiologist's bill rather than the loan that was now no longer with the bank.
The interests was mounting and collection agents began calling campaign.
If I did land a part-time position at the City College of Chicago (CCC), teaching Adult Continuing Education, the income wasn't enough to pay rent and eat. Yet, the collection agents called and called. They would always find my address and send those "Perhaps you forgot" letters.
I remember one collector informing me that I wouldn't have a place to live if I didn't come up with a payment plan. We are the federal government!
I continued to work at the City Colleges as a part time instructor while I paid for one course per semester at the University of Illinois Chicago, in pursuit of a MA. A two-year program was finally completed in five years while I worked as a Director of Student Activities at Harold Washington College, lost my mother to cancer, and underwent a myomectomy, earlier in the year I graduated with my MA in English.
By 1990, I was advised to file for a bankruptcy if I wanted to pursue a doctorate program.
By the following year, the bankruptcy came through, and I was able to accept a fellowship at Loyola University Chicago. I had some breathing room for the first four years while completing the classroom segment of the doctorate. Tuition was paid, and I received a stipend of $733 a month. Most of that money went to paying rent. However, after I completed my comps, I secured a $8,000 loan to work on the dissertation. At this juncture, I didn't want to be ABD, that is, All-But-Dissertation!
I also worked as an instructor for the City Colleges and Loyola University Chicago, when allowed to do so by the dean. Otherwise, fellows weren't allowed to teach or procure another source of income without notifying the graduate dean.
And the racism never stopped. As long as I was teaching English Composition, by the book, that is, using a prescribed textbook that still recognized "American Literature" as that written by the likes of William Byrd, Fenimore Cooper, and Hawthorne, then I was barely visible. When I added Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to the American narrative, I suddenly became a person of interest, as they say. Someone to be watched. And the phone, when I had one, would ring: Collection agents, abrupt, impatient, and threatening, reminded me that I had next to no power against them and what they wanted from me!
They called me a "troublemaker" at the University of Wisconsin Parkside where I accepted a 2-year Visiting Professorship, even when I had fears about entering the state of Wisconsin. I kept thinking well, it's not far from Illinois. Not far... Almost immediately, the bursar's office called my office: Hey, there's a loan you owe. Garnishment or a payment plan. You choose!
This "you choose" business had gone, off and on, for years before. Right up to the myomectomy and beyond and right up to the heart surgery at Iowa's Heart Center. I used up my 401K and whatever pension I had accumulated from the City Colleges, Chicago State University, Northeastern University Chicago, Roosevelt University Chicago, Loyola. I needed money for expenses, to move, to pay rent. I needed money to participate in activist activities. The very activities that predominantly white institutions considered "troublesome".
By 2013, I decided to apply for disabilities since the University of Wisconsin Madison, and before them, campuses in Philadelphia, made sure I didn't have any classes to teach. I started to experience a few symptoms of something that didn't seem related to the heart condition. I had headaches, dizziness, blurry vision. My right foot was stiff. I underwent three CT scans and an MRI before the University of Wisconsin Madison medical system informed me that I needed to see a psychologist. It was now December 2013. See a psychologist! You're delusional.
Earlier that year, 2013, I was advised to speak with a social security ombudsman. I think over a $100 dollars was taken out of my social security benefits check each month. I was barely paying rent and eating, and yet, I was teaching. I didn't see any way of escaping this trapdoor. I really didn't expect much from the ombudsman. The collection agency for my loan, however, was threatening to take away everything and to do everything.
You won't have anything ! Watch and see !
I think it was over in one day. An ombudsman called me and asked if I had time: He read the information I supplied him and he needed to call the collection agency. He dialed and I listened on the other end to the collection agent, speaking with the upmost respect, to this young ombudsman. Was that fear I detected in this agent who had no problem calling and threatening me. The ombudsman reminded the agent that I was a senior. Did he read that? Did he know he was removing money from my social security? Did he know that I had paid the original loan and had been paying interest, forever? What part of this narrative didn't he understand?
It was a small check. My first job was in 1969, when I applied for my social security card. I was a teenager, but given that those years working on my undergrad with income that barely made a dent with social security, and latter, when I couldn't work, for the most part, during those six or seven years while working on the doctorate, I was between a rock and a hard place. Trapdoors everywhere!
The end of 2013, I was relieved to have a little more of more social security check, but I stayed clear away from the University of Wisconsin Madison clinics. I need to see a psychologist! I can only imagine what would have happened to me, a black woman alone--besides being discredited for life.
On June 3, 2014, I suffered a seizure less than 10 minutes after returning home from running errands that morning. It was midday, but so very dark for me. I felt sick to my stomach. When I bent over, I nearly fell. My head was throbbing, and somehow I did end up on the floor of my living room. I could barely see to call 911.
A tumor. A meningioma tumor. Benign, but, on the right side, just above my ear, it had been pushing my brain toward the left. The doctors thought I might lose eyesight in my left eye. Instead, I lost a little peripheral vision. Ten years in the making. And the cancer? The multiple myeloma? It was there too! In the blood work! But I'm not told this until I moved back to Kenosha to recover from the surgery to remove the tumor.
I became a pariah for my subject matter: the violence of white supremacy in American literature, between 1900-1945. Alone, I had confronted racists white chairs and deans, mainly white men with slaveholder grins on their faces. White women too rarely gave me a break. If I was a matter of their positions and protesting the way I was treated as usually the only black in English then they looked to their little white children back at home. Their children were in need of financial security. No trapdoors for them!
It's like those who sat on their balconies, eating in luxury, while others walked through the ruins of what once was their homes. Others inhaled the smoke from a newly established concentration camp. Others, too, attended "picnics" that featured the torture and burning of a black American during Jim Crow.
It's like Haiti. Or Gaza now. We are still waiting to end shipment of weapons to Israel!
Fascists are the hardhearted. They will not give up!
Those who will or have received those emails can come out from the shadows now. They can hold their head up high and not feel ashamed. Not remain silent.
But they must remain vigilant. We all must be vigilant.
Education should be free. Should be a right for all Americans. But we can't continue to allow the 1% to wage war on humanity and think we are free.
