Will Blog for Food

Alan Collinge, American Hero

It's a sad story when someone out of the blue launches a personal attack against someone who has done and is doing so much to right a wrong that exists in our society today. Alan Collinge is a victim of the predatory student loan industry, particularly Sallie Mae, which was privatized in 1997. His website is Student Loan Justice. The practices of Sallie Mae are particularly pernicious because they are seeking to maximize their profits on the backs of the hapless students who believed they were doing the right thing by taking out loans to further their education and believed their on-campus advisors (who were getting kickbacks) who directed them to Sallie Mae. So much for in loco parentis. Young students who were advised to go to college by their parents because it was in their best interests in pursuing the American dream made the mistake of assuming that colleges and universities were operating under the same assumptions. That was a big mistake. In a nutshell, here is the problem:

In 1997, under intense lobbying from student loan companies, The Higher Education Act (HEA) was amended, and defaulted student loans became among the most lucrative, and easiest to collect type of debt. These amendments allow for huge penalties and fees to be attached to defaulted student loan debt, take away bankruptcy protection for student borrowers, dissallow refinancing of the debt, and also provide for draconian collection and punitive measures to be taken against student borrowers, including wage garnishment, tax garnishment, withholding of professional certifications, termination from employment , social security garnishment, and others. According to Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren in a Wall Street Journal piece by John Hechinger , "Student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious."

Similar to the health insurance indusrty in which United Health Care CEO William McGuire has taken home annual pay packages of more than $100 million annually, Al Lord, CEO of Sallie Mae and a piker compared to McGuire, has made about $225 million in the last five years. William McGuire and Al Lord are two peas in the same pod. Just as the health care industry makes its profits by denying needy (insured) people health care, Al Lord and Sallie Mae have sought to profit off of any student who, God forbid, lost a job, got sick and couldn't work or had any other difficulty in paying back their loan. Even though Sallie Mae's loans were government insured, which means they got paid by the government whether or not a student paid back their loan, there was no such insurance for the students themselves. They were still saddled with huge fees and penalties, and Sallie Mae executives bragged about how much they were making not only on principal and interest but also off of multiplying penalties inflicted on any student in difficulty. Government protected not the student but the corporation. But that's what privatization is all about.

Alan's quest has led him to very carefully document this situation, be a clearinghouse for other students in similar straits and to publicize this issue, and he's done a great job! He has also taken a cross-country tour in order to draw attention not only to his plight but to that of many others. There have been some small attempts by Congress to correct this situation, but so far the results are meager. Sallie Mae was sold earlier this year to private equity firms J C Flowers (25%), Friedman Fleischer and Lowe(25%), Bank of America(25%) and J P Morgan Chase (25%). But the student loan stuation, as bad as it is, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Bush administration under the sway of the neocons seek to privatize every industry. Take the mortgage industry, for example. On November 12, 1999, (two years after the student loan industry was privatized), President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This made it possible for mortgage companies and commercial banks to sell mortgages to Wall Street investment bankers who then collateralized and securitized them, slicing and dicing them up and selling them off to investors. They sold adjustable rate loans to prospective homeowners, telling them the rosy scenario that they would always be able to refinance before their loans reset in the same way that loans were sold to students by on-campus advisors. In both cases loans were pushed on unsuspecting and unsophisticated customers by salesmen that had a financial interest in getting them to sign up. So mortgage loans, student loans and health insurance are three sides of the same game: privatization. Once privatized, industries seek not to serve their customers but to profit off their misery with CEOs and top executives taking home huge pay packages. This is the name of the game for the Bush Administration.   

Once mortgage loans were signed, they were collateralized, securitized and sold off in tranches to investors who were seeking to profit off the fees and penalties that would ensue after the loans reset and the mortgagee couldn't keep up with the payments. Just as in Alan Collinge's case, when people started having their homes foreclosed on, right wing apologists for the corporatization of America started blaming the victims saying that they hadn't read their contracts carefully enough and were irresponsible, not living up to their commitments. The fact of the matter is that the investment professionals such as Citibank and Bear Stearns didn't know what they were doing either since they ended up losing billions while many mortgage holders simply walked away from their homes losing nothing in equity because they had no equity in the first place or went bankrupt because, unlike in the student loan industry, the mortgage industry had neglected to secure from Congress legislation that would have forbidden mortgage related bankruptcies. That's why the investors  lost  money while the mortgage holders walked away. That's the difference between the mortgage industry and the student loan industry. Al Lord was a prolific lobbyist and stacked the deck in his favor. Charles Prince at Citibank dropped the ball on that so he was let go (with a substantial golden parachute). He wasn't predatory enough! No such problems in the health care or student loan industries. And the credit card industry is busy lobbying to make it impossible to declare bankruptcy due to credit card debt.

The ABS index was devised so that investors could make money from "synthetic exposure" to asset backed securities such as mortgages. They also had plans to extend into student loans, auto loans, credit cards and other assets. So where the student loan industry was headed was the pooling or collateralization of student loans, securititzing them and then selling them off to hedge funds. If the economy develops as the neocons plan, every debt will be collateralized, securitized and sold off to investors in this way. Each of the loan industries then will seek to maximize their revenue streams by putting in place draconian fees and penalties for those who, God help them, screw up in any way from late payments to missing payments to any other departure from the fine print which they will manipulate from time to time in order to throw the payer off. In fact incompetence in the loan industries as incompetence in government will always accrue to the increased debt of the debtor. This is part and parcel of the financialization of the US economy which will eventuate in a debtor class and an investor class. In a sense the middle class has always been a debtor class: mortgage debt, car loans, credit cards. What is the average person't greatest expense over the course of a lifetime: home? cars? possessions? No, the greatest expense is interest. The average person spends more servicing his/her debt than for any other product or service. But there was always the hope that the debts would be paid off before retirement. When you factor in student loans, deregulation of the financial industry, and lack of bankruptcy protection (except for corporations), you will end up with a debt industry on steroids and average Joes in debt till their dying day. That's the plan!

This scenario is what makes Alan Collinge's work so important. Surely those with student loans should be given protection under the bankruptcy laws but instead they've been thrown to the wolves. It will only get worse as more and more industries are privatized and lobbyists for those industries get the laws changed, as Al Lord did, to  benefit their executives. Oh, by the way, Al Lord is under investigation by Congress.

Remove the Cap On Social Security and Means Test It

Social security is screwed up. It's a regressive tax on the poorest people. The rich are exempted from paying it, but they still receive it although they don't need it, and then the government "borrows" it to pay for its wars and military-industrial complex. Then politicians complain that it's going to run out of money. Duhhh!! And it's only supposed to be for people who paid into it but a third of the recipients are disabled people so it's not really just a retirement plan for working people but a plan for people who otherwise would be destitute which is what it should be. Then why are the rich who have investment income and don't need it receiving social seceurity benefits?

They tax employees and employers each 6.2% for social security (real name "Old Age, Survivors and Disability" program) and 1.45% for Medicare for a total of 15.3%. Note that this is a regressive tax in that the tax rate is just the same for those earning $1 a year as it is for those earning $90,000. Income tax, on the other hand, is minimal to non-existant for low wage earners so that the poorest wage earners end up paying more for social security and medicare tax than they do for income tax. In addition, self-employed workers such as myself pay a whopping 15.3% (both employee and employer shares) for social security and medicare. There are several things to do both to increase the fairness of the tax and the fairness of the benefits: 1) Eliminate the cap on income after $90,000  so that the rich will pay on their entire income not just part of it. After all these are the people who can afford to pay more. 2) Means test social security so that people with large investment incomes, passive incomes, unearned incomes or whatever you want to call it receive less or no social security income when they retire. 3) Make the social security and medicare tax progressive so that poor people pay little or nothing and rich people pay more than 7.65% if they're employees and more than 15.3% if they're self-employed. By the way poor self-employed are paying a higher percentage tax for social security and medicare than rich hedge fund managers are paying in income tax, and the rich hedge fund managers, earning upwards of $100 million a year, are only paying social security tax of 6.2% on the first $90,000 of their income, a mere pittance. However, there is no cap on the medicare portion of 1.45%, a step in the right direction! 4) Exempt the first $50,000. from social security and medicare taxes instead of all income greater than $90,000. In other words cap the bottom not the top!

Then they want to privatize it. Talk about compounding stupidity with insanity! First of all let's discuss the purpose of it. Shouldn't it be about providing people in their advanced years and old age with a minimally decent lifestyle regardless of their income from other sources such as life savings? If so, rich people shouldn't be getting it at all, right? But they should pay into it because there's no certainty that they will end up being rich. They could lose all their money and then they should be eligible for it. So means testing would guarantee that people not needing it wouldn't get it and people needing it would and in what amounts. The basic principle should be that the well off should help those less well off, a principle that's anathema to the Republican Party but a basic Christian principle. Jesus said to the rich man, "Sell what you have and give the money to the poor" or words to that effect and "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven", and "Blessed are the poor..." The basic Christian message is that the rich, because they have been extraordinarily fortunate, should help the poor because they have been extraordinarily unfortunate. Now these right wing Republican evangelicals believe the exact opposite disqualifying them from even being Christians in my view. Their philosophy is really social Darwinism - devil take the hindermost.

And Jesus didn't discriminate between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor." So even the good for nothings who have squandered their money on drugs, made bad decisions one after another their entire life and were too lazy to get off their butts still deserve a minimally decent life in their old age or if they become disabled. Jesus never discriminated between deserving and undeserving poor. But right wing Republican evangelicals do. So-called megachurches with incomes in the tens of millions a year might qualify as Christian if they gave the bulk of that to the poor, but, if they don't, they're not Christian even though they call themselves that, in my opinion. Christianity has become a distortion and perversion of Jesus' teachings, but this is nothing new. Medieval popes collected indulgences (money constituents paid to get themselves or their relatives out of purgatory and into heaven), collected art, fought battles and in general lived the lives of secular humanists. Christianity would not even have been a major world religion if the Roman emperor Constantine had not made it the official religion of Rome in 325 AD. Theodosius made it the state religion in 392 AD. After that all other religions were forbidden. So Christianity has been subverted and perverted for 1700 years or more. This is nothing new.

Matthew 25 says: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?' And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.' Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.' Then they will answer and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?' He will answer them, 'Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.' And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Jesus' so-called social gospel is at the heart of his ministry. The rich should help the poor. Social security at its heart represents an even lesser requirement in that, for the most part, it represents the average person paying into a fund to eventually help herself. Paying in according to income should go without saying. In fact the more one earns, the higher percentage one should pay. In other words the social security tax should be progressive. On the other hand the payout should be according to need. Rich people don't need to collect social security. Poor people do. But there is no way of knowing who is going to be rich and who is going to be poor. That's why it's an insurance program. And the refusal of most Christian churches, especially right wing evangelicals, to support government programs to help the poor and disadvantaged is why I'm not a Christian. At least not in their sense.

And then they try to parse it that they don't believe in government programs to help the poor, but they do believe in private or voluntary programs to help the poor. Give me a break! Government is we the people acting collectively. I'm sure the rich right wing Republicans were grateful for government help when their houses were about to burn in the recent California fires. There is an appropriate sphere for government activity and vice versa for private  enterprise. Some things can be done more efficiently and effectively by collective or government action, namely building roads, fire fighting and helping the poor. Private old age insurance would simply screw the elderly in order to generate higher profits for stockholders and higher salaries for CEOs.

Another thing: in order to qualify for social security one must work ten years. There are a lot of people who, for one reason or another, have not worked or have not paid into social security for 10 years. So what's to happen to them in their old age. Out on the street? Shouldn't everybody be entitled to some minimal assistance in their old age? Homelessness is a travesty, but that's what happens to poor people who cannot pay rent in the USA. Many of them are veterans. This is a double travesty. Alcoholics and drug addicts should not be given money but in kind food and housing. Nobody should be out on the street.

Current law exempts anyone from paying social security taxes on salaries more than $90,000. That means that someone earning a million dollars (or a hundred million in terms of hedge fund managers) pays the same social security taxes as someone earning $90,000. This is not right. And it isn't right that the Federal Government is actually using money that has been collected for social security and medicare to fund other parts of the government, namely, war and the military-industrial complex. Then the Bush Administration has no money for children's health insurance, the SCHIP program, that, if entirely funded, would represent about two weeks worth of the money spent on the war in Iraq. There's always money for war and tax reductions for the rich. The poor have to beg for crumbs from the table.

How to Have Freedom from Compulsory Education and Freedom to Pursue One's Own Interests

The following excerpt is from Remem- bering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age, by Ralph Berton. Bix Beider- becke was one of the greatest jazz music- ians of the 1920s who died tragically of alcohol- ism at the age of 28 just as the Jazz Age came to an end.

Walking back this time, a thought struck Bix. It was bound to come up sooner or later; it always did. "Say, Frenchy, don't you go to school?" "Huh uh," I said, shaking my head. He blinked. "How come?" Where shall I begin, a grownup might have begun. I gave the simplest answer. "The truant officers don't know about me," I said, which was true, but raised more questions than it answered. For the first time I saw Bix pursue a topic (other than a musical one) with aroused interest. I had evidently touched a nerve. It was a topic I myself had never really analyzed though the bare facts were, I knew, sufficiently bizarre. Then and in subsequent conversations, Bix succeeded in eliciting most of them. I think the very first one floored him as much as any: that, in all my thirteen years, perhaps two - scattered among various schools here and in Milwaukee - had been spent in schoolrooms; despite which, I had nevertheless graduated at the age of eleven (W. G. Goudy Elementary, Winthrop Avenue at Foster, Chicago, June, 1922). My diploma was not earned by any burst of academic brilliance. "They were happy to see me go," I said, smirking. Unlike poor Bix, I had never considered it my place to placate the authorities; I was determined to make them pay dearly for the crime of having imprisoned me, and my teachers bore the brunt of my vengeance. I don't know what they'd done to deserve me, those poor hardworking maiden ladies. I regaled Bix with tales of my exploits, now appalling in retrospect: correcting their English in front of the class (All right, children-everyone take their seat. Uh, Miss Hattrem, shouldn't it be 'Everyone take his seat'?); asking trick questions on subjects I knew they knew less about than I did (Miss Pierce, is air a compound or a mixture?), "innocent" questions on embarrassing subjects - remember this was 1920 (Miss Clark, what's the difference between an ox and a bull?) (Miss Deely, what's a strumpet?) ... for good old Shakespeare was a gold mine of painful passages, though I never quite had the nerve to tackle my harried instructresses on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V, Scene 5: "Send me a cool rut-time, Jove," cries Falstaff, "or who can blame me to piss my tallow?" Needless to say, I was a hero to my fellow captives, but it may be imagined how glad the authorities were to hand me that precious bit of ribboned paper and say, with Groucho Marx, "Go, and never darken my towels again." How well I succeeded in conveying all this to Bix is questionable. That there could be any way around the long torment of going to school, never in a thousand years could such a thought even arise. What wouldn't Bix have given, as a boy, for such a deliverance? All of us, in fact, Vic and Gene too, had grown up outside the walls of school and church, had got whatever education we got at home or at work, and by hanging around with complaisant grown-ups. We were also spared other sacred institutions we saw imposed on all other kids, such as "dressing up" and taking medicine. Even vaccination had been inflicted on us over my parents' strenuous protests, at gunpoint, as it were; for Pa and Ma had a rooted mistrust of that other priesthood too, the one in white, with its pills and its needles. ("Did you ever see a deer take a pill?" Mummy would ask triumphantly, adding the crushing sequel, "Or use a can opener?") "Nature" was their religion, meaning lots of raw foods, fresh air, etc. (Papa died at eighty-six of a pneumonia he got swimming through the Lake Michigan ice in January - a good fourteen years short of his expectations; the week before, he'd swum his usual nine miles.) My nonschooling explained both the woeful holes in my education (if that's the word) and my precocious "vocabulary" (my admirers' favorite word), as well as my remarkable repertory of remembered music, my familiarity with college-level astronomy, chemistry, etc., and my surefooted ability to get around any city by myself after a few days' investigation. No doubt my eidetic memory helped, but it was afforded unusual opportunities for use: the time other kids had to waste in school, learning Palmer Method Penmanship and catalogues of dates and battles that would be gratefully forgotten two days after the "tests" for which they had been memorized, I could spend learning, or doing, exactly what I wanted. If I wanted to read the entire collected Works of Thomas Hardy (I did, during one of my childhood illnesses), that was O.K., and if a month later I felt like rereading the whole set (which I also did), I could do that too. I could spend all day and evening listening to Le Sacre if I chose, or the latest New Orleans Rhythm Kings record (I did, for three days, when Leon Rappolo, their clarinetist, became my Hero of the Month). Was it surprising that I soon knew them by heart? So would you, if you weren't packed off to school for 30 hours a week. I said as much to Bix, who asked, "What about your pa?" I was also blessed with a delightful schlemiel of a papa who would rather go exploring with his little boy any day than bother about such trivia as making a living. He took me for star walks until all hours, igniting my infant interest in astronomy (of which, however, he could tell me little); days we often spent poring over maps of whatever town we were in, marking promising sounding places and then, by God, going there (usually on foot), a practice that equipped me with a lifelong love of walking and of finding my way about - all this before I was six.

This passage says it all. Obviously a brilliant man who wrote this excellent biography of Bix Beiderbecke, a man who wouldn't have been so tortured if he had been blessed with parents like Berton's, Ralph Berton was able to pursue from an early age those subjects which really interested him rather than having to digest the bullcrap one has to to succeed in the educational system in order to get the proper credentials and degrees. My contention is that most people would be better off pursuing in life that which really interests them than in having to meet educational "requirements," which not only cause a lot of unnecessary frustration but even downright torture, and also that the educational system holds people back to their "grade level" whereas someone like Berton pursued his interests at an early age up to and beyond the college level without unnecessary prodding.

The only learning that sticks with a person is learning he or she has pursued on his or her own, in other words, autodidacticism, and this is true in or out of school because one cannot learn a subject just by listening to a teacher or professor expound on it. One must do the reading oneself; one must work the problems oneself. You might as well read the class notes or a text or, better yet, original sources as have the professor try to inject his knowledge into your head by bloviation. It's not going to happen. As for credentialing, I'll learn the subject on my own, thank you, without student loans and educational requirements and pass any credentialing test you can throw at me. One should have that option, but then the educational institutions would be out all that money.

More on Outrageous CEO Pay

Larry Ellison, who dropped out of two colleges, is CEO of Oracle Systems and is worth $16 billlion. As the 11th richest man in the world he does not even need to earn a huge annual compensation package. A CEO like Ellison literally cannot spend enough on personal consumption to stop his fortune from growing. According to Corp Watch, Ellison would have to spend over $183,000. an hour on things that cannot be resold, like parties or meals, just to avoid increasing his wealth.

Last year the eight most highly paid CEOs each took home more than $100 million. Activist investors are introducing resolutions at annual shareholder meetings challenging such obscene levels of executive pay but so far without much success.

In May, at the annual meeting of the Denver-based telecom Qwest, high school teacher Linda Baggus — annual salary: $55,000 — wanted to know how CEO Dick Notebaert could justify his annual earnings, estimated at $33 million by one Midwest daily newspaper. “How is the service that you render so much more valuable than the service I render?” she asked. Notebaert gave the standard corporate defense for American CEO pay levels. His pay, he explained, depends on his “performance” and reflects the realities of a “very competitive market” for executive talent. His defense carried the day. Four shareholder resolutions designed to clamp down on CEO pay excess failed to win majorities at the Qwest meeting.

Some activists think that corporate employess should share in the wealth of the corporate executives. Margaret Covert coordinates shareholder activism for NorthStar Asset Management, a Boston-based wealth management company. “It comes down to having a company share its bounty with all its workers,” she told CorpWatch. “All workers have contributed to company success. They should all share in the rewards, not just the top tier.”

NorthStar asked shareholders of ExxonMobil, the world’s most profitable corporation, to call on the company to prepare a study that compares the “total compensation package of our CEO and our company’s lowest paid U.S. workers in September 1995 and September 2005. “As shareholders,” the proposed NorthStar resolution read, “we are concerned that the over-compensation of top executives has a negative effect on employee morale and customer trust.” NorthStar president Julie Goodridge carried the resolution to the May 30 ExxonMobil annual meeting at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, reminding the thousand or so shareholders present that CEO Rex Tillerson took home just over $22 million in 2006. “Our resolution asks shareholders to join us in questioning why it takes our lowest-paid employees a full year to earn what Mr. Tillerson earns for an hour on the job,” Goodridge said, “… because we believe it is fiscally irresponsible for a company to put so much of its resources into a single individual. “High company profits do not justify outrageous CEO compensation.” No shareholders spoke in favor of Goodridge’s resolution.

The same thing was tried at Wal-Mart. “If options are a good incentive to get people to do a good job,” says Mike Lapham, director of Responsible Wealth, a national group that links affluent individuals from across the U.S. and which introduced the resolution, “why not use them for employees on the store floor, too, and help the women and people of color who work at Wal-Mart build their assets?” They didn't have any luck with their resolution either.

Other countries have laws that allow unions to have a say in their executives' pay packages.

U.S. trade unions pushed particularly hard this spring for “say on pay” resolutions designed to give shareholders the right to take annual advisory votes on executive pay packages. This right is now enshrined in law in Australia, Sweden and the UK. In the Netherlands and Norway, shareholders have the right to take a binding executive pay vote.

Current US corpoprate law encourages companies to pay their CEOs outlandish salaries and stock options. They are allowed to deduct from their taxes far more money than the options cost them. Since 1993, Occidental Petroleum has claimed $353 million in tax deductions for stock options that went to the company’s CEO. The total that would have been deducted if reforms initiated by Michigan Senator Carl Levin had been law: $29 million. There are a few CEOs who think $3 or $4 million is enough annual compensation. “There's only so much crap you can buy,” Peter Rose, a Seattle-based corporate CEO who took home $4.7 million last year, told his hometown newspaper. But the attitude of most CEOs is proof that human greed has no bounds, and that sharing does not come naturally to the human spirit.

Utopian Vision: Citizen Contractors Replace Corporations, Unions

Modern societal organization is composed of large scale institutions such as corporations and unions. The problem is that large corporations dominate the private economy sucking profits while minimizing labor costs. In other words their aim is to pay the people working for them as little as possible while enriching a few at the top. Hence you have outsourcing, hiring of illegals and obscene CEO pay among other maladies. Likewise, government workers are mainly unionized resulting in huge pension and health care costs and inefficient work performance since unions protect their workers from being fired regardless of their performance. This has put a stranglehold on many municipal governments which would be better off contracting out the work and firing city employees. The only problem is that the work would be contracted out to large corporations who would replace good paying jobs with low paid workers taking the difference in profits. What is the solution to this syndrome?

The idea is to set things up so that society serves and empowers the individual worker/citizen. The laws regarding corporations need to be changed. They should no longer be given the rights of personhood as they now are. The employer-employee relationship, which is basically a master- servant relationship, needs to be changed. Corporations, most  of which are now publicly owned via stock, should be set up in such a way that stock ownership is extended to all members of society and not just a select few. The corporation would still be publicly owned except now it would be owned by all members of the public and not just those who had the money to invest in stock, in other words not by just the investor class. Each citizen would have the rights of a contractor and not just the right to be hired as an employee. That means that various entities, government and corporate, would contract with citizens in such a way that the citizen and not the entity is empowered. Rating systems which monitor the citizen/contractor's performance would allow high performers to negotiate from a stronger position. Low performers would have an incentive to improve or else face the prospect of lower pay for their efforts.

Government would function in such  a way as to provide a giant  job search matching citizen/contractors to various openings that meet their requests for location, hours, working conditions, full or part time etc. Corporate power would be diminished to the individual level.  Corporate ownership would be society wide. Union membership would be society wide. That is each citizen (and not just a few union members) would benefit from union membership. A union member would be basically just a  citizen. For  example, unions ususally negotiate with corporations for health care benefits.  If health care is society wide such as in a universal health care system, then there is no need for a variety of unions to negotiate this benefit just for their members. In a democracy all the citizens should be able to vote for benefits that would apply to all members of society and not just to union members. By the same token, unions would not be in a position to protect "deadwood," non or low performing workers.  This would be reflected in each worker's job performance rating as an individual and in subsequent contracts. High performers would be able to command and  negotiate more money for the same contract than low performers. 

Small business enterprises could be started by individuals or groups and be privately owned. Once they reached a certain size, they would have to go public much as they "go public" today after they reach a  certain size.  The only difference would be that public ownership would be  extended to all members of  society. The  original owners of the business could be "bought out" by society mush as they are bought out today by the infusion of cash from an initial public offering (IPO).  So the essentials of entrepreneurship would  remain the same. The difference would be that corporations as entities in themselves would be disempowered and individuals would be empowered. Government and the corporate world would function in much the  same way in their relationships with individual workers. Government inefficiency is eliminated  by virtue of the fact that individual workers who didn't perform well would not be considered as seriously in the next round of contracts. There would be no need for firing someone. They just might not be given a subsequent contract or they wouldn't be given it on such favorable terms. However, non performance of a contract would be handled much the same as it is today. Managerial pay including that for CEOs need not be substantially higher than that for any other kind of work. Those qualified for any particular type of work would be taken into consideration for any openings. Their performance rating from previous contracts would be taken into account, and then the best person or persons would be chosen in such a way as to provide society with the best quality and quantity output for the monies expended in pay.

Just as huge amounts of money and power should be taken away from corporate management and ownership, the same should apply to government. Lobbying should be outlawed. Influence peddling should be eliminated. The revolving door between government and corporations should be  restricted. Political advertising should be curtailed.  It is by these means that relatively small groups of individuals seek to dominate the entire society for their own benefit and to the detriment of the vast majority. Their attempts at concentrating power and financial benefits in the hands of a relative few is something that should be severely restrained. Society should be self regulating and self organizing in such a way that each citizen has roughly the same power. Power and financial benefits need not be exactly the same for each individual; there can be a range of outcomes dependent on each individual's ability and performance, but no one individual or group should be able to dominate the entire society either politically or economically.

Preferensism is a philosphy of societal organization which accomplishes most of what is desirable in terms of the dispersion and distribution of power among all individual citizen voter/contractors. It enables the self organization and self regulation of society by providing a mechanism for linking financial rewards to quantity and quality of work performed. It empowers the individual by expanding the scope of available jobs, by providing a giant database of work available under a variety of working conditions. This is all integrated in such a way that all the desired work gets done as efficiently as possible. The individual is empowered. Equality of input to the system is guaranteed; equality of outcome is not. Dominant submissive work relationships such as employer-employee relationships are eliminated.

Alternatives to Going to College

Sometime ago I did a blog post on "10 Reasons Not to go to College." Robert emailed me and requested I do one on the alternatives to going to college. Well, here it is. Actually this post will also be applicable to someone who wants to pursue a line of work for which a college diploma is required as well. A college diploma is only one among a number of credentials which may or may not be required for any particuler job. Other credentials, for example, are licenses such as contractors' licenses, licenses to practice law, medicine, pilot a plane, drive a truck, graduate degrees etc etc. The cost of each credential and how many are needed and the time and effort required to get them should be a factor in whether or not they're worth pursuing.

1.  Spend the equivalent of a one semester high school course in doing research on various occupations, jobs, careers, ways of making money, businesses, arts, crafts, trades, lines of work etc in order to come up with a semi-exhaustive list of ways of making a living. Actually, this should be a required course at the high school level.  This is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make in your life so why not give it serious study, research, time and consideration?  How much time do you spend taking courses in high school math? Most of you will never use anything beyond elementary school math in your whole adult life unless you are going to be a top level scientist, engineer or mathematician. Balancing a checkbook and other financial transactions will probably constitute 100% of your adult math activities and these require nothing more then elementary mathematics, mainly addition and subtraction. In order to impose order on your list, you can also categorize different kinds of jobs by industry such as the construction industry, the real estate industry etc.

2. Once you've come up with you semi-exhaustive list of ways of making money, develop a list of your own interests, passions, hobbies and other satisfying activities regardlesss of their revenue producing potential. If you can combine these with something that's revenue producing that's great, but often they must be pursued on two separate tracks. In other words, if you can get paid for what you love doing, this is the ultimate scenario, but often you must do something revenue producing on one track and non-revenue producing on another, but it's important to take both into account when you're trying to figure out a satisfying and enriching lifestyle. How important is money and how important is it having the free time to pursue whatever you love to do? For some people, waiting on tables while having lots of time to surf or ski might be a more satisfying lifestyle then spending 40-60 hours a week in an office.

3.  Once you've come up with your semi-exhaustive list, rate each job, occupation, line of work, way of making money etc in several ways. #1 How enjoyable would it be for you? What is your interest level or passion level for this line of work. Compare each line of work with your list of interests and activities you would pursue even if you weren't being paid to do them. #2 How lucrative is  the line of work per hour? #3 Can you be either self-employed or other-employed in this line of work? #4 What are the credentialing requirements and how much time and money is necessary to get them? #5 Will you be working primarily by yourself (good for introverts) or primarily interacting with others (good for extroverts)? #6 Will you have control over your working conditions or will these be controlled by others? For instance, will you be able to set your own hours? Will you be able to work as much or as little as you want? Will you be able to work out of your home or perhaps the neighborhood Starbucks or will you be confined to an office? #7 How sedentary or non-sedentary is the job?  Those with a lot of physical energy may not want to sit at a desk all day. #8 How much natural talent do you have for the job? Don't try to be a mathematician if you're not good in math. #9 What are what I call the sideline serendipities of the job? What I mean by that is what can you do with the skill set required for your primary job as either a revenue producing or non-revenue producing but inherently more saatisfying sideline? For instance, if your primary job is as a journalist, you can write books and get them published on the side. Ben Franklin was a publisher so he could not only publish the works of others for which he was paid up front but publish his own works such as Poor Richard's Almanac which was a more speculative venture for which he might make money if enough people bought it (enough did). A handyman can work for others and build spec houses on the side. #10 How readily can you make money at this job? Is it readily marketable? Can you step right in and make money at it or is there a long period of relatively meager returns before you start to make good money? How much competition is there? How much demand is there for this type of work? #11 How easy is it to combine your revenue producing labor with your other interests in life and here I include your family and relationships as well as your hobbies and interests? Is your work life enhancing or stress producing, emotionally and psychologically satisfying or nerve wracking?

4. Once you've shortened your list to areas of activity that you think you're most interested in, contact other individuals already working in those fields. Ask if you could spend a day with them as they go about their work. At least try to interview them and ask questions. Try to get a feel for the job. Don't let them snow you or lay a PR trip on you. You want to find out what the job is really like, not have them try to impress you with how wonderful it is while at the same time they are hating it.

5. Get involved in some line of work you're interested in at as early an age as possible. Start racking up real life experience. If it turns out that the work experience isn't what you thought it would be, you have plenty of time to change. In the meantime you're making money.

6. If you start your own business, be willing to live frugally while you grow the business. You might have to plow most of your income back into the businesss. I had a friend who loved Macintosh computers and started his own MacLab. He had a storefront so rather than pay two rents, he lived in his office. He had rows of the latest computers which he used for training, and at night he rolled out his sleeping bag and slept in the aisles between the computers.  He was one of the best engineers I've ever known, and, by the way, did not have a college degree. Instead he had a passion for his line of work and was good at it. If you have a work vehicle such as a van which you use for a mobile service of some sort, consider partially converting your work vehicle into a dual purpose camper and sleeping in it until you get your business established.

7. Evaluate your list of jobs with respect to capital investment required. Don't forget that college requires a considerable capital investment if you take out student loans. Many people come out of college $100,000. or more in debt. You could start a great business (which you would then own) for that.

8. Get whatever credentials you need by the cheapest possible route. When you get to be a lawyer, for example, nobody is going to be interested in where you went to college only in whether you can win their case. Your reputation will count far more than where your degree came from. Start out with a two year community college (always cheaper) and then transfer to the cheapest 4 year school to get your degree. Beware of "degree mills" however. Get your credentials from a reputable institution and if the leaarning experience is not that great there, it's up to you to learn your stuff on your own in spite of the quality of the school. That's the only way you'll learn anything anyway. Forget about having the teacher cram stuff in your head without any effort on your part.

9. The debate about whether going to college is to prepare you for a more lucrative career or to enhance your general intelligence is over as far as I'm concerned. You can learn all the art, music and history you're interested in by reading books throughout your adult life. You don't need to go to college to study these subjects.  If you do go to college, go simply in order to get a credential necessary for pursuing a line of work you want to pursue. And if you're not interested in history, why should you study it ever? You'll only do so to pass a test and it'll stick to you about as much as water on a duck's back. Many people go through life with very limited knowledge in areas they're not interested in and are none the worse off for it. Evaluate each credential (college or otherwise) as you would an investment. Does the rate of return justify the time and expense?

10. Finally, do you have control over your line of work or does it control you. Can you live where you want and pursue it? Will you be able to decide how long you want to pursue it or will someone else make that decision?. For example, if you work for a corporation and they outsource your job, someone else is making the  decision that you should retrain for another occupation when you might have been perfectly satisfied with the one you had.  Does someone else or you decide when to retire? You might  want to retire when you're 50 or, if you love your work, you might never want to retire. Do you have control over it or does someone else?

11. Finally, finally, don't be intimidated by facing life without a college degree. Parents, teachers, politicians and the  education establishment have endevored to create the  Weltanschauung that you're a total failure and will never amount to anything in life unless you go to college. Plain and simple, it's bulllshit. Some of  the  richest and most accomplished people, including Bill Gates, the  richest man in the  world, don't have college degrees.

10 Reasons Not to Get a Job

The following article can be found at Steve Pavlina . com:

Just for fun I recently asked Erin, “Now that the kids are in summer school, don’t you think it’s about time you went out and got yourself a job?  I hate seeing you wallow in unemployment for so long.” She smiled and said, “Wow.  I have been unemployed a really long time.  That’s weird…  I like it!” Neither of us have had jobs since the ’90s (my only job was in 1992), so we’ve been self-employed for quite a while.  In our household it’s a running joke for one of us to say to the other, “Maybe you should get a job, derelict!” It’s like the scene in The Three Stooges where Moe tells Curly to get a job, and Curly backs away, saying, “No, please… not that!  Anything but that!” It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job.  But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself.  There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude. Here are some reasons you should do everything in your power to avoid getting a job: 1. Income for dummies. Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea.  There’s only one problem with it.  It’s stupid!  It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income!  This is truly income for dummies. Why is getting a job so dumb?  Because you only get paid when you’re working.  Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent to only earn income when you’re working?  Have you never considered that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working?  Who taught you that you could only earn income while working?  Some other brainwashed employee perhaps? Don’t you think your life would be much easier if you got paid while you were eating, sleeping, and playing with the kids too?  Why not get paid 24/7?  Get paid whether you work or not.  Don’t your plants grow even when you aren’t tending to them?  Why not your bank account? Who cares how many hours you work?  Only a handful of people on this entire planet care how much time you spend at the office.  Most of us won’t even notice whether you work 6 hours a week or 60.  But if you have something of value to provide that matters to us, a number of us will be happy to pull out our wallets and pay you for it.  We don’t care about your time — we only care enough to pay for the value we receive.  Do you really care how long it took me to write this article?  Would you pay me twice as much if it took me 6 hours vs. only 3? Non-dummies often start out on the traditional income for dummies path.  So don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been suckered.  Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for money is indeed extremely dumb and that there must be a better way.  And of course there is a better way.  The key is to de-couple your value from your time. Smart people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive income.  This can include starting a business, building a web site, becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from creative work.  The system delivers the ongoing value to people and generates income from it, and once it’s in motion, it runs continuously whether you tend to it or not.  From that moment on, the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing your income (by refining your system or spawning new ones) instead of merely maintaining your income. This web site is an example of such a system.  At the time of this writing, it generates about $9000 a month in income for me (update: $40,000 a month as of 10/31/06), and it isn’t my only income stream either.  I write each article just once (fixed time investment), and people can extract value from them year after year.  The web server delivers the value, and other systems (most of which I didn’t even build and don’t even understand) collect income and deposit it automatically into my bank account.  It’s not perfectly passive, but I love writing and would do it for free anyway.  But of course it cost me a lot of money to launch this business, right?  Um, yeah, $9 is an awful lot these days (to register the domain name).  Everything after that was profit. Sure it takes some upfront time and effort to design and implement your own income-generating systems.  But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — feel free to use existing systems like ad networks and affiliate programs.  Once you get going, you won’t have to work so many hours to support yourself.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be out having dinner with your spouse, knowing that while you’re eating, you’re earning money?  If you want to keep working long hours because you enjoy it, go right ahead.  If you want to sit around doing nothing, feel free.  As long as your system continues delivering value to others, you’ll keep getting paid whether you’re working or not. Your local bookstore is filled with books containing workable systems others have already designed, tested, and debugged.  Nobody is born knowing how to start a business or generate investment income, but you can easily learn it.  How long it takes you to figure it out is irrelevant because the time is going to pass anyway.  You might as well emerge at some future point as the owner of income-generating systems as opposed to a lifelong wage slave.  This isn’t all or nothing.  If your system only generates a few hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step in the right direction. 2. Limited experience. You might think it’s important to get a job to gain experience.  But that’s like saying you should play golf to get experience playing golf.  You gain experience from living, regardless of whether you have a job or not.  A job only gives you experience at that job, but you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real benefit at all.  Sit around doing nothing for a couple years, and you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher, or politician. The problem with getting experience from a job is that you usually just repeat the same limited experience over and over.  You learn a lot in the beginning and then stagnate.  This forces you to miss other experiences that would be much more valuable.  And if your limited skill set ever becomes obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth squat.  In fact, ask yourself what the experience you’re gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years.  Will your job even exist then? Consider this.  Which experience would you rather gain?  The knowledge of how to do a specific job really well — one that you can only monetize by trading your time for money – or the knowledge of how to enjoy financial abundance for the rest of your life without ever needing a job again?  Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the latter experience.  That seems a lot more useful in the real world, wouldn’t you say? 3. Lifelong domestication. Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program.  You learn how to be a good pet. Look around you.  Really look.  What do you see?  Are these the surroundings of a free human being?  Or are you living in a cage for unconscious animals?  Have you fallen in love with the color beige? How’s your obedience training coming along?  Does your master reward your good behavior?  Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands? Is there any spark of free will left inside you?  Or has your conditioning made you a pet for life? Humans are not meant to be raised in cages.  You poor thing… 4. Too many mouths to feed. Employee income is the most heavily taxed there is.  In the USA you can expect that about half your salary will go to taxes.  The tax system is designed to disguise how much you’re really giving up because some of those taxes are paid by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck.  But you can bet that from your employer’s perspective, all of those taxes are considered part of your pay, as well as any other compensation you receive such as benefits.  Even the rent for the office space you consume is considered, so you must generate that much more value to cover it.  You might feel supported by your corporate environment, but keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it. Another chunk of your income goes to owners and investors.  That’s a lot of mouths to feed. It isn’t hard to understand why employees pay the most in taxes relative to their income.  After all, who has more control over the tax system?  Business owners and investors or employees? You only get paid a fraction of the real value you generate.  Your real salary may be more than triple what you’re paid, but most of that money you’ll never see.  It goes straight into other people’s pockets. What a generous person you are! 5. Way too risky. Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves. Morons. Social conditioning is amazing.  It’s so good it can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth. Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (”You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you?  Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10? The idea that a job is the most secure way to generate income is just silly.  You can’t have security if you don’t have control, and employees have the least control of anyone.  If you’re an employee, then your real job title should be professional gambler. 6. Having an evil bovine master. When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way.  When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.” Did you know that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means master?  Another meaning of the word boss is “a cow or bovine.”  And in many video games, the boss is the evil dude that you have to kill at the end of a level. So if your boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make you?  Nothing but a turd in the herd. Who’s your daddy? 7. Begging for money. When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money?  Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then? Or are you free to decide how much you get paid without needing anyone’s permission but your own? If you have a business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.” 8. An inbred social life. Many people treat their jobs as their primary social outlet.  They hang out with the same people working in the same field.  Such incestuous relations are social dead ends.  An exciting day includes deep conversations about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the unexpected delivery of more Bic pens.  Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to strangers.  Ooooh… scary!  Better stay inside where it’s safe. If one of your co-slaves gets sold to another master, do you lose a friend?  If you work in a male-dominated field, does that mean you never get to talk to women above the rank of receptionist?  Why not decide for yourself whom to socialize with instead of letting your master decide for you?  Believe it or not, there are locations on this planet where free people congregate.  Just be wary of those jobless folk — they’re a crazy bunch! 9. Loss of freedom. It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee.  The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will.  A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations.  This leads the new employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible.  Thus, the employee will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question.  Stir in some office politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave. As part of their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on.  We can’t very well have employees thinking for themselves, now can we?  That would ruin everything. God forbid you should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy.  Oh no, it’s the end of the world!  Cindy has a plant on her desk!  Summon the enforcers!  Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training! Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course.  The only policy they need is:  “Be smart.  Be nice.  Do what you love.  Have fun.” 10. Becoming a coward. Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about problems at their companies?  But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s fault.  It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into spineless cowards.  If you can’t call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no longer free.  You’ve become your master’s property. When you work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you?  Of course it will.  It’s only a matter of time before you sacrifice the noblest parts of your humanity on the altar of fear:  first courage… then honesty… then honor and integrity… and finally your independent will.  You sold your humanity for nothing but an illusion.  And now your greatest fear is discovering the truth of what you’ve become. I don’t care how badly you’ve been beaten down.  It is never too late to regain your courage.  Never! Still want a job? If you’re currently a well-conditioned, well-behaved employee, your most likely reaction to the above will be defensiveness.  It’s all part of the conditioning.  But consider that if the above didn’t have a grain of truth to it, you wouldn’t have an emotional reaction at all.  This is only a reminder of what you already know.  You can deny your cage all you want, but the cage is still there.  Perhaps this all happened so gradually that you never noticed it until now… like a lobster enjoying a nice warm bath. If any of this makes you mad, that’s a step in the right direction.  Anger is a higher level of consciousness than apathy, so it’s a lot better than being numb all the time.  Any emotion — even confusion — is better than apathy.  If you work through your feelings instead of repressing them, you’ll soon emerge on the doorstep of courage.  And when that happens, you’ll have the will to actually do something about your situation and start living like the powerful human being you were meant to be instead of the domesticated pet you’ve been trained to be. Happily jobless What’s the alternative to getting a job?  The alternative is to remain happily jobless for life and to generate income through other means.  Realize that you earn income by providing value — not time – so find a way to provide your best value to others, and charge a fair price for it.  One of the simplest and most accessible ways is to start your own business.  Whatever work you’d otherwise do via employment, find a way to provide that same value directly to those who will benefit most from it.  It takes a bit more time to get going, but your freedom is easily worth the initial investment of time and energy.  Then you can buy your own Scooby Snacks for a change. And of course everything you learn along the way, you can share with others to generate even more value.  So even your mistakes can be monetized. Here are some free resources to help you get started: The Courage To Live Consciously (article on how to transition to more meaningful work) Podcast #006 - How to Make Money Without a Job (audio) Podcast #009 - Kick-start Your Own Business (audio) Podcast #014 - Embracing Your Passion (audio) 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed (article) How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) (article) How to Make Money From Your Blog (article) One of the greatest fears you’ll confront is that you may not have any real value to offer others.  Maybe being an employee and getting paid by the hour is the best you can do.  Maybe you just aren’t worth that much.  That line of thinking is all just part of your conditioning.  It’s absolute nonsense.  As you begin to dump such brainwashing, you’ll soon recognize that you have the ability to provide enormous value to others and that people will gladly pay you for it.  There’s only one thing that prevents you from seeing this truth — fear. All you really need is the courage to be yourself.  Your real value is rooted in who you are, not what you do.  The only thing you need actually do is express your real self to the world.  You’ve been told all sort of lies as to why you can’t do that.  But you’ll never know true happiness and fulfillment until you summon the courage to do it anyway. The next time someone says to you, “Get a job,” I suggest you reply as Curly did:  ”No, please… not that!  Anything but that!”  Then poke him right in the eyes. You already know deep down that getting a job isn’t what you want.  So don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise.  Learn to trust your inner wisdom, even if the whole world says you’re wrong and foolish for doing so.  Years from now you’ll look back and realize it was one of the best decisions you ever made.

10 Reasons Not to Go to College

1. A college diploma does not guarantee you a job. The conventional wisdom is that, if you don't have a college degree, you won't do well in life. They are selling you a bill of goods! They are using statistics to lie which anyone can do with statistics. Who are "they?" Those who stand to gain by getting you to go to college, namely, colleges and universities, themselves, and corporations for whom you are grist for the mill. I feel sorry for all the youngsters, especially poor black kids from the ghetto, who swallow this crap thinking everything will be hunky-dory if they just do what they're told and stay in school. Many of them are destined to wake up one day and be very disillusioned realizing that they have been lied to and sold a bill of goods if everything doesn't turn out as they were promised it would. Here are some reasons to think twice about college.

Your job can be terminated, RIFed (Reduction in Force-ed), outsourced. You can be fired, laid off, let go, given a pink slip, terminated. If you're self-employed, none of these things can happen to you. You don't need a college diploma to be self-employed or to start your own business. After all Bill Gates started Microsoft without a college diploma or degree. He is a college drop-out! Fresh out of college you may or may not be able to get a job. But if you lose your job after 10 or 20 years and are unemployed, the chances of your ever getting another one diminish with age. After 40 or so, the chances you will ever get hired again - especially in a high tech field - are negligible. The government doesn't guarantee you a job. Private industry will use you or discard you as they see fit. As you get older, your skill set will diminish relative to younger just-out-of-college types and your salary will have escalated compared to their starting salaries so that you're ready to be discarded as far as a corporation is concerned. They need to keep labor costs low in order to increase profits because their first responsibility is to their blessed shareholders, not to their employees. You're better off taking the $100,000. you would have spent on college and becoming one of their shareholders instead!

2. Student Loan Debt. Students coming out of college today are starting off with $50K to $100 K in student loan debt. It's like having a 30 year mortgage without having the benefit of a place to live. The money might have been better invested in a mortgage in the first place. An investment in real estate will appreciate over the years. An investment in a college education that leads to your becoming an employee will depreciate. Of course, if your college education prepares you for a profession which enables you to be self-employed or go into business for yourself, this is not true. No one is in a position to "let you go" if you are your own boss.

3. Self-education is better than forced feeding. You can learn more, develop your brain better and have more knowledge than most college graduates simply by reading 2 hours a night. Such subjects as art, history, literature, foreign languages, music appreciation as well as many other subjects can be self-taught. The learning resources are available on the internet and in public libraries. Why pay money for something you can get for free? All that is required is self-discipline rather than someone standing over you threatening you with failure if you don't study and pass tests! The beauty of being self-taught is that then you will learn what you are truly motivated to learn, what you are really interested in rather than courses that are required to get your degree. Such courses will be immediately forgotten once the final has been passed .

Many contributors to human knowledge were autodidacts, that is people who were sufficiently interested in whatever field to teach it to themselves. Such geniuses as Sir Isaac Newton (pictured at right) and Gottfried Liebniz, who simultaneously developed calculus, were largely self-taught. A lot of great musicians and artists are self-taught. The only reason to actually go to college is to get credentialed in a field that you really want to enter, and then it should be possible (it only isn't in order to give job security to professors) to just take an exam (like it used to be for the law) in order to gain the credential. Abraham Lincoln taught himself law and passed the bar without the benefit of a college education or diploma. Then he was actually able to make money at it - all without the benefit of a college degree.  Today, of course, we are much more civilized, requiring our lawyers to have a college degree in addition to passing the bar!

Anything you can learn in college you can learn on your own. If you want the equivalent of a college education, find out the course list and reading lists for any degree of the college of your choice. Then read all the same books. Anything you want to know is available on the internet. Why study a lot of boring stuff you're not interested in? You won't retain it anyway. Most college students study enough to regurgitate on a test and then immediately forget it. It's wasted time and energy. Study and learn what you're interested in instead of what is "required." That way you only will be learning what you have a passion for. Most people that are successful in their professions have a passion for what they do, not merely a "ticket of admission" to the field of their choice which is what a college degree represents.

4. Money Invested in a College Education Would Be Better Invested in Real Estate. If you took the money most people invest in a college education and bought a chunk of real estate instead at age 18, you'd be able to retire with the income and/or profit from this investment in 30 years. You do the math. Money invested is gaining appreciation and/or interest. A student loan will end up costing you many times the value of the loan itself in interest for a college diploma that only depreciates in value if all you have to offer is your labor as an employee. From a corporation's point of view you are just a labor input regardless of whether or not you have a degree. Don't think you're a privileged character just because you have a college degree. You're not, and, in a corporation's eyes, you're totally discardable especially if they can get somebody cheaper to do the job, say somebody in India or China. Don't think an American educational institution has anything over the educational institutions in India or China either. In many cases they're a lot better, and their graduates sure work cheaper.

5. Money Spent on College Education Would Be Better Invested in Starting Your Own Business. If you are your own boss, you don't need a piece of paper to prove to an employer that you're worthy of being hired by him. You don't have to worry about sucking up to your boss or getting along with your co-workers. Everyone I know who is an employee undergoes all kinds of stress having to deal with co-workers and bosses. Employees are stuck with their co-workers and stuck with their boss. The only way of getting rid of them is to quit your job. Be your own boss and you don't have to put up with that kind of crap. Bill Gates didn't need a college diploma to start Microsoft. In fact he doesn't have one and neither do a lot of entrepreneurs and people who have made great contributions to society.

6. Don't think a college diploma eliminates risk. Corporations are in the business of shifting risk to their employees rather than, as they traditionally have, assuming it themselves. Increasingly, employees are having to assume the risk for their own pensions which can be lost in risky investments in the stock market via 401ks. This risk used to be assumed by employers with defined benefit pensions. No more. Now there are defined contributions; read - YOU TAKE THE RISK! Also, if circumstances change for the corporation, you can be downsized, laid off, let go, fired, whatever euphemism, you want to apply to it...terminated? The corporation (or any employer for that matter) has no obligation to keep you employed. Health care is another risk employees are being asked to shoulder alone. Suddenly, paternalistic corporations are no longer paternalistic. You're on your own, baby! And don't expect unions to bail you out. Unions are passe with membership decreasing with each passing year.

So why not look your risk squarely in the face and become an entrepreneur, start your own business whether it's as a gardener, painter, handyman, carpenter, architect, civil engineer, lawyer or whatever. Just because you're a gardener doesn't mean that you're not the owner of a business that has value. Your customer list is a valuable asset that can be sold some day if you wish to retire or do something else.

Also there's no reason why you shouldn't develop a few different skill sets. For instance, you could become an excellent cook or a waiter. Doesn't take a huge training investment to do that. Then while you're pursuing an education in another field, you can be making money doing something more basic. Also it's something to fall back on should you ever be "downsized." Many people have aspirations toward very risky fields such as being an actor, musician, novelist or artist. Having an ability to make money in more mundane fields such as gardening or accounting may act as a launchpad (read "day job") for professions that are inherently more satisfying and are potentially more lucrative but in which relatively few are able to gain a reputation or make any money. If what you are doing is a labor of love, making money may not even be a requirement so long as you have an alternative way to make a living. Borat gave himself 5 years to make it as a comedian before he would give up and go into something more mundane. As it turned out, it took almost the whole 5 years before he started getting anywhere and now he's made tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of dollars on a #1 "moviefilm"  for which the production expenses must have been unbelievably low.

7. Start Life Early. Don't Delay it by Going to College. You don't have to delay real life by 4 to 8 years. You can start a family and your kids will be grown and out of the house before you are old and gray. You have a jump on real world experience. College unnecessarily delays starting out in life. At a time when your peers are graduating from college with so much student loan debt that they can't even afford to date, let alone get married and start a family, you could own your own business which you started from scratch, have a family started and own a house.

Be earning money during the 4 to 8 years you might have spent in college. Learn a basic trade or profession and build your business over the years you would have spent in college. Pay the minimum necessary to procure whatever credentials you need to practice that trade or profession. Learn it on your own. The only college degrees worth having are in the "thousand year old professions" such as law, architecture, civil engineering, medicine. In these professions you can hang out your own shingle - be in business for yourself. Forget high tech and anything that requires you to work for a corporation or as an employee and doesn't let you have the option of starting your own business. These degrees are worthless. As a laborer with a college degree, no matter how high tech, you are just a commodity. As a self-employed businessman, you call the shots, make the profits and build a business which has a value in itself, which can be sold some day if you choose to do so. Live simply and on the cheap when you're starting out pouring most of your money into your fledgling business. Be homeless if you have to. Live in your car or work vehicle. If you have a shop or storefront, live there. No sense in paying 2 rents. After you get going, you will be able to afford to move up in the world.

8. A 4 year college degree is worth practically nothing these days. Since these degrees have become so common, colleges and corporations have upped the ante requiring more and more college, graduate school, specialized training, licenses, post-docs and every other way they can figure to keep you paying tuition and racking up student loan debt which you will probably be paying off in lieu of a mortgage for the rest of your life.

9. College trains you to be a docile and compliant employee. Is this how you want to live your life? As Caspar Milquetoast? The second you mouth off to your boss, you're history! Be a free and independent individual instead. Have a passion for what you do. Have real knowledge instead of a piece of paper that says you know something. Do real work instead of make work. Be willing to take the risk of starting your own business instead of the pseudo-security of being somebody else's employee. Then you don't have to take crap from anyone or kiss anybody's ass!

Most college courses do not train you to do anything useful in the real world. Even as a working engineer, I never used 98% of the course material I had to learn in college. I had a professor at Georgia Tech who demanded that every electronics engineer be capable of working a thyratron problem. I was never asked to work a thyratron problem in my engineering work life or even to design any kind of a circuit. I was never asked to work a calculus problem. (Calculus was a required course.) Most, if not all, engineers do nothing more than push paper - especially if they work in the military-industrial complex. Of course, a lot of people are perfectly happy doing this!

Instead, learn a trade or a profession that deals with reality head-on. Otherwise, you're merely equipping yourself to be a paper-pusher. And you have no skills that are relevant to anything anyone would want to pay for in the real world if you lose your job in the corporate world. I found that the best engineers I met in my life were not even college graduates but people who had a passion for whatever it was they did. If you don't have a passion for your work, forget it, unless you're perfectly happy sitting on your ass and doing nothing all day. Then, by all means, get a college degree and enjoy collecting middle class welfare!

10. Learning resources are available for free in libraries and on the  internet. Anything you want to know is already available to you. Why pay for it? You're not going to learn anything by going to college if you don't have the self-discipline to study it on your own. You have to put in the effort. The teacher can't transfer the knowledge painlessly from his brain to yours. Most professors are useless anyway. All you end up doing in class is taking notes which you are  forced to decipher later. You might as well buy the notes and study them on your own rather than wear out your writing hand trying to keep up with the professor in class. He will have taught you nothing except how to take notes. Most of the material can probably be found in the text book or from other sources anyway.

Some of the great men in American history were autodidacts not products of educational institutions. Take Ben Franklin, for example. He only had a third grade education yet was a scientist, inventor, author, publisher, writer, diplomat - an all-around Renaissance man. He invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and bifocals among other things. He was fluent in 5 languages. He was also one of the wealthiest men of his day and was highly regarded as a scientist for his pioneering work in electricity. As a printer, he also had access to the tools necessary in becoming a published writer. This is an example of what I call concomitant serendipity, when a proficiency in one vocation synchronizes with another enabling one to move from one to the other with ease. Another example is becoming an architect and a contractor at the same time. That way one can design and build one's own spec houses. After so many of these, one has a track record that prospective clients can check out. With this approach you can start your own business from scratch making money at first from selling spec houses that gain you a reputation as an architect and later from clients who are impressed by the legacy of the houses you've designed and built. Another example of concomitant serendipity is a journalist who writes books on the side such as Bob Woodward, an editor of the Washington Post who has written 12 best-selling non-fiction books. Look for professions that allow you to do other perhaps more satisfying and lucrative work as a by-product.

"It's the Corruption, Stupid!" - Why the Student Loan System in the US Should be Investigated

This is a subject we have blogged on before.

The following article is from Alan Collinge, founder of Student Loan Justice.Org:

In exit polls this Tuesday, voters listed corruption as a bigger concern than the War in Iraq. While the White House, Congress, and others inside the beltway may pooh-pooh this sentiment, the citizens hold it dearly, because they see the effect corruption has on their lives.

Take the student loan industry, for example. Since 1994, the cost of attending college has skyrocketed, to where the average student can expect to graduate with over $18,000 in debt for a four year degree. Sallie Mae, the largest provider of student loans, and former Government Sponsored Entity has seen its stock price rise by nearly 2000% during the same period. Its executives have paid themselves billions in stock bonuses. Its Chairman recently attempted to purchase a major league baseball team. Its CEO again topped the list of highest paid CEO’s in Washington D.C.

Many don’t realize that Sallie Mae lobbied for- and got- draconian legislation passed during the same time period. This legislation took away bankruptcy protection for all student loans - federally guaranteed or not. This legislation made it illegal for most borrowers to refinance their consolidated debt, even with lenders willing to accept less profit. This legislation gave the lenders collection powers that would “make a mobster envious”, to quote Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren. These powers include termination of public employment, income tax seizure, wage garnishment, suspension of professional licenses and certificates, and seizure of social security, and disability payments. This legislation has actually made it more profitable for lenders when students default, as opposed to remaining in good stead with their loans.

This legislation has created the perfect mousetrap for a most vulnerable segment of our population: lower and middle class citizens aspiring to achieve the American Dream through higher education.

Those who do everything right, and pay their loans on time are shocked at the sticker price of their education, and many put off marriage and children because of their debt. Less fortunate citizens who weren’t able to capitalize on their education for health, employment, or other reasons are faced with the choice of paying double, triple, or even more than they originally borrowed, or being forced to live “off the grid” and living in fear of their government. Some are fleeing the country. Some are even taking their own lives. Sallie Mae attributes its record profits to fees and penalties extracted from these borrowers.

So where’s the corruption in this? Consider that the Chairmen of both the House and Senate education committees (Buck McKeon, and Michael Enzi) have taken millions of dollars from the student loan industry, and funneled some of this money to family members through campaign committees or PACS. Not to mention the chartered flights for golf in Boca Raton, ski trips to Big Bear, fishing trips in Wyoming, and other extraordinary excesses that this money paid for. John Boehner, who has received the most from student loan companies and is former chairman of the House education committee, secured a job for his daughter with a student loan company (since acquired by Sallie Mae) over a game of golf.

Consider further the corruption inside the Department of Education, which actually makes money from the business of defaulted loans, receiving $1.20 for every dollar paid out. The head of the Federal Student Aid program, Theresa Shaw, was brought into the Department of Education from Sallie Mae, and brought many of her Sallie Mae cronies with her. One has to wonder aloud whether this group was attracted to these lower paying government jobs out of an altruistic nature, or whether they or their family members have a residual interest in the success of Sallie Mae.

A recent OIG report warned Ms. Shaw that her oversight program for student loans was highly vulnerable to conflicts of interest, and that the Department relied too heavily on “partnerships” with student loan companies, rather than real oversight. Again, one has to wonder if that happened by chance, or by design.

Senator Durbin recently called for an investigation of the student loan industry with respect to inducements, and “preferred lender arrangements” between lenders and schools.

One would hope that the new Congress, as it “drains the swamp”, will pay particular attention to the cesspool where Sallie Mae and its ringers within the Department of Education are holed up.

Alan Collinge is the founder of StudentLoanJustice.Org, a grassroots organization.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Disposable Workers and Salesmanship

In her new book, "Bait and Switch", Barbara Ehrenreich puts forth the theory that, since there are more female college graduates these days and since they are scoring higher on tests and grades, they should be in the higher positions in US corporate life. To her consternation, however, the male college goof-offs are still populating the higher reaches of corporate life. Why? Is this fair?

Ehrenreich likes to accept certain parts of American mythology and then cry foul when this contradicts another tenet of American mythology forgetting that it's all only mythology anyway and maybe her time could be better spent debunking the myths and giving people sound career advice instead of complaining about how irrational it is that the myths aren't consistent. Myth #1: The more highly performing a person is in college, the better in terms of position and earnings that person will do in real life. This is a bunch of BS put forth by the educational system to insure that they have a steady flow of customers lusting after college degrees. The educational system myth would have you believe that the key to success is success in learning a bunch of technical crap that's in high demand by corporate employers. The reality is that people who are just good technically are at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. What they would not have you believe and what the truth is is that a good salesman in whatever field is worth ten times what a good technical person is any day because they are the people who actually bring home the corporate bacon and these skills you don't learn in school unless you learn them by goofing off and developing social as opposed to intellectual skills.

I worked in the military-industrial complex for 15 years so my experience is limited to that area but the same principal applied. At the Navy research lab where I worked, I noticed that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the projects, the departments, how they were organized or anything else. That's because the single most important organizing principle was that a department was only as successful as the department head's ability to pry money loose from Congress or the Pentagon. That is to say each department head was essentially a lobbyist who spent most of his time in Washington, DC tapping Congressional pots and selling them a bill of goods about whatever they could in order to bring money into their department and hence into the lab.

This would explain why the Antenna Department, whose technology was well established 50 years ago, had more workers and a larger departmental budget than the Microelectronics Department, a department whose field of endeavor was a current hotbed. The simple explanation is that the Antenna Department head was a better salesman than the Microelectronics Department head was. That was all there was to it. That was simply the main organizing principle. It had nothing to do with the needs of the Navy, the needs of defending America or anything else. It had simply to do with who could successfully sell Congressmen and other Pentagon types who were sitting on pots of money to part with that money. That's the way the system worked. The Department head didn't need a PhD from Cal Tech or MIT. He needed salesman skills which he would more probably have learned at the  local bar rather than in calculus class.

The MIT and Cal Tech types would be just the worker bees at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. Of course, in Barbara Ehrenreich's world she thinks that just because men are at the top of the corporate totem pole and not nerdy women this proves prejudice and discrimination toward women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that women who have barely the least in educational credentials but who do have great faces, bodies and/or personalities will have a far better chance of ascending to the higher, more rarified spheres of corporate life. So you see, Barbara, it's not quite as unfair as you try to lead people to believe. It's just that the mythology is false.

In the military-industrial complex, the lowest level is occupied by those who only do technical work. Then you have many levels of middle management all progressively at higher GS levels (in civil service) until you get to the department head who is at the highest GS level because he brings in the most money. The dirty little secret is that all the engineering, math and other hard technical subjects you studied in college only position you to be the lowest paid workers in the complex who are doing essentially the crap work, most of it make work with hardly any real life consequences other than to produce some bogus report that some Congressman's intern might look at approvingly so the next round of funding can continue. As far as making the US a safer place, you've got to be kidding. As far as those who do well in college being in the upper echelons, that's a joke.

When I was in college studying to be an Electrical Engineer at Georgia Tech, in one of the advanced electronics courses I had a professor who proclaimed, "Every Electrical Engineer should know how to work a Thyratron problem!" You knew there would be one on the final which I worked correctly. They only cared if you put the right number in the box. It didn't matter if you had the right approach but made a little mistake. No credit for that! This was hardball, baby. The real world. No hand holding! If you had the right number, you got full credit. If you were off by one decimal, you got zilch. Needless to say, I went forward with full confidence that I could tackle any Thyratron problem in the real world that I was asked to do. I was ready to apply my engineering skills that I had worked so hard to acquire. Only problem was, not only was I never asked to do a Thyratron problem in the corporate world, I was never even asked to do a circuit design problem of any sort.

The truth is that most engineers in the military-industrial complex are nothing more than contract monitors or liasons who travel a lot. Any serious work that needs to be done is sub-contracted out to Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) which is an adjunct to Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which is an adjunct to MIT where they have a lot of really top notch PhDs who are ready and able to do the highest level technical work. The BSs and MSs who populate the military-industrial complex, whether in the civil service or in the corporations (I have worked for both), will seldom get a chance to do anything of any meaningful technical value for which they were trained, but will instead continue to