The whole edifice of American life seems to have been violently shaken, although the extent of the true damage remains unclear. Even to those of us who realized early on the dimensions of the bubble, the broad-based hysteria of property porn, the opiate of flipping houses and putative permanent gains, the unfolding reality still comes an unpleasant shock. The tentativeness of the new administration and the usual political intrigues that seemed so interesting last fall now seem palliative, the last gestures before we hear “Switch her OFF!”
–Oso Raro, “The Way We Live Now“
- Exhale
- Drink
- Go for walks
- Ride my bike
- Take pictures
- Read fiction
- See movies
- Drink more
- Daydream
- Go to parties
- Have a party
- Travel
- Cook
- Dance
- Laugh
- Blog
In other words, I will do everything I did before I started my dissertation, only more so.
I came across the Gender Analyzer while reading The Lotus Notebooks and was compelled to give it a spin. The results?
We guess http://thesmokingsection.wordpress.com/ is written by a man (52%), however it’s quite gender neutral.
Should I feign surprise?
The problem with political ideas like feminism is that you are not allowed sometimes to say the truth. In Germany we have lots of older, very famous feminists. And it is not allowed for me as a young feminist to say that women are masochistic. I am and all my female friends are. We stand in front of the mirror, we are naked, and we feel ugly as fuck. We see everything as wrong. We try and fight our body to become prettier and work on it. It’s not at all free and self-confident. I don’t want it to be like that, but I see that it is.
–Charlotte Roche, on her novel Wetlands
Not eight hours after I finished writing my last post, Mother Jones published this timely article about the crisis of college affordability. I touched on many of the same themes in a piece I wrote about the Quebec student strike four years ago, but Andy Kroll summarizes some important new research that bears quoting. Specifically:
Colleges and universities have [ . . . ] undergone a dramatic shift in the kinds of financial aid they give out. Grants have been largely replaced by student loans issued by governments and private lenders. In the decade between the 1997-1998 and 2007-2008 academic years, student loans more than doubled—from $41 billion to $85 billion—and the number of students taking out those loans soared from 4,100,000 to 6,111,000, according to “Measuring Up 2008.”
Between the 1992-1993 and 2003-2004 academic years, student borrowing rose by 89%, from an average of $3,884 to $7,336 per year. Meanwhile, grant aid lagged, increasing only 57% from $3,545 per year to $5,565, while the Pell Grant lost much of its purchasing power: In 1979, it paid for 75% of the cost of attending a four-year public college or university; today, only about 30%.
This point about “purchasing power” is absolutely crucial, since most public sources of student assistance–i.e., those that are targeted to low and middle-income students such as Pell and G.I. grants in the US, or the Canada Student Assistance Program here–currently offer little or none. Without purchasing power, grants do nothing to advance their original goal, which was to provide economic access to post-secondary education for students who cannot rely on private means. Instead, grants provide an illusion of access, which masks the extent to which the financing of education has been privatized and therefore how disadvantaged those low-income students who do make it to university are in comparison with their peers.
In light of this, I think that Kroll is right to predict that Americans may “emerge from economic disaster with their college and university system looking unrecognizably different and staggering numbers of potential students shut out of an education.” To say that this is not the system I had hoped to teach in is an understatement; it is also precisely my fear.
R. tipped me off to a sea change in Canadian student loan policy today, which finally allows for the possibility of income-contingent debt repayment. The new regulations will limit a borrower’s payments to no more than 20% of their gross household income and cap their total repayment period at 15 years, after which time any remaining debt will be forgiven. Apparently, a similar policy was adopted in the United States last fall, although the payments of American borrowers will be capped at an even more generous 15% of discretionary income and additional amounts will be forgiven for those involved in public service.
Although this is extraordinarily good news for low- and middle-income students, I can’t help but wonder why it took a full-blown economic crisis for our governments to reform the student loan system. That’s a largely rhetorical question, of course; as I’ve argued elsewhere, education was subject to the same neo-liberal ideology that has brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse, and student loans were managed in much the same way as sub-prime mortgages, which we now know were the catalyst for it.
The problem was and remains the gap between the average earner’s income and the cost of post-secondary education, which, like housing, is prohibitively high. While government has made the management of student loan debt somewhat less arduous, it has done nothing to resolve this core issue. Already, some American colleges are rejecting qualified low-income applicants in favour of less qualified students who do not require financial aid, and with both public and private funds evaporating, the situation can only get worse.
Still, I am relieved to know that I will no longer be expected to make $600+ monthly payments to my lending institution irrespective of my future employment status or income level. This means that I can afford to live on a modest salary after I graduate, and the future, while still uncertain, is just a shade brighter because of it. Phew!
Kahnawake smoke shop
A surprisingly well-researched article from yesterday’s Gazette about the contraband tobacco industry. If I wasn’t writing a dissertation about something else I’d have a whole lot to say about it, but for now some quick points:
- I don’t know anyone who still smokes store-bought cigarettes. At nearly $10 a pack, I don’t know anyone who could afford to.
- Knowing this, I am extremely skeptical about government claims that smoking rates have dropped drastically, as these are usually based on declines in legal cigarette sales.
- Despite the fact that cigarettes are not technically illegal, smoking bans function as a kind of spatialized prohibition, which leads me to wonder if every depression starts with one.
- I am fascinated with the way that smoking traverses political fault lines in Quebec, both in terms of the historically fraught relationship between First Nations communities and the provincial police (remember Oka?) and the economic divide between the city of Montreal and the regions.
- I remember the last spike in contraband cigarette sales in the 1990s and the fact that both levels of government were forced to roll back tax increases to counter the problem. I suspect that it would be political suicide to do the same today, so smuggling is probably here to stay. That is, of course, unless we start seeing mob wars, in which case all bets are off.
- In the meantime, I am quite happy to give my money to the Mohawk Nation rather than to the government. Idiots.
From today’s G20 protests in London.
via Dick Puddlecote
Yes, you read that right: “smokers,” not “smoking.” As Michael Siegel explains, the social panic about “third-hand smoke” has officially begun. Consider yourselves warned.
I remember
pacing
as their skies lit up
and dialing
but not getting through
then pacing
then dialing again
again
again.
No
it wasn’t like a video game
at all.
