Huey Long, Student Loans and Jubilees

From my primary "I Protest" Substack (August 2022) donaldjeffries.substack.com

This previously published article is especially relevant now, given the schism developing between technocratic elites like Elon Musk and the MAGA faithful. The One Percent doesn’t care about you. Whatsoever. They will exploit you relentlessly to profit themselves. Their winning is not your winning.

The Biden administration recently forgave some of the massive student loan debt that has crushed far too many young people who attended college. As always, government “help” is dubious, inconsistent, and often seems to go to those who need it least. In this case, that might be the Harvard law students.

Conservatives are doing what they do best in responding to this. They are up in arms over what they consider a “handout.” Conservatives hate “handouts.” Unless, of course, it’s to billionaire owners of sports franchises. Or the countless tax perks that have always been exclusively for the benefit of the wealthy. Or foreign aid. They don’t balk at that much any more. Many of them #Stand With Ukraine. Or all the freebies that cheap labor parading across our open southern border receives. No, their anger is triggered to its full extent by their neighbors getting something they aren’t.

Now, many of their arguments are eminently sensible. What about the students who paid off their loans? What about those worked to pay their tuition? Now that is mostly a faulty Boomer recollection at this point. You certainly could do that in the past, when tuition rates were dramatically lower. I don’t think many kids are paying their college tuition now by working as servers in restaurants. The focus should be on those ridiculous tuition fees.

I delved into some of the money that gets thrown around by colleges in Survival of the Richest. Amazon is practically giving away the Kindle version- check it out. It’s more relevant now than ever. I think Harvard alone has an endowment fund of over $50 billion. So why aren’t they bailing out their former students’ loans? Why are the taxpayers, and not the institutions that saddled young people with such onerous debt, the ones doing the forgiving here? We didn’t loan any money for college, so why does Joe Biden, or any other politician, have the right to forgive any of it?

Now, the Huey Long in me wants to cheer at any debt forgiveness. But in this case, it’s very selective. Why not forgive credit card debt? That would impact just about everyone. Or mortgage debt? Or car loans? Small business loans? Considering all the small businesses that were destroyed by the unconstitutional lockdown, that one ought to be a no-brainer. And those rare souls without debt, who I’ve heard from on this issue, perhaps ought to be rewarded for being fiscally responsible.

You will never hear any preacher lobby for a Year of Jubilee, but it was certainly a Biblical tradition. The idea of absolving the people of all their debts every twenty years expressed an empathy and fairness that is missing in our modern world. Imagine what a Year of Jubilee could do for so many millions of families today. And to those without debt, they could be given some kind of financial reward, too. And if you think that “we” can’t afford such an idea, think again.

Survival of the Richest delineated this massively rigged system in all its gory detail. Our economy is based on the casino model; eighty percent must lose in order for twenty percent to win. And win bigly. There is so much wealth in this country that if you divided it all up equally between every man, woman, and child, it would come to an astounding $343,000 each, according to a 2019 study by the Brookings Institution. Keep in mind this is known wealth, and doesn’t include anything hidden in all those unaudited foundations, or off shore reserve accounts. And that’s also not counting whatever is hidden within the also unaudited Federal Reserve System.

Now I’m not advocating that we divide everything up equally like that. But the numbers show that with the incredible wealth that exists here, every adult should be able to live independently, and certainly no one should be homeless. Instead, over 75 percent of workers are living paycheck to paycheck. Almost the same percentage don’t have $500 in savings. The bottom half of Americans have less than one percent of the collective wealth. The three richest billionaires in this country have more than that bottom half. You don’t have to be Bernie Sanders to realize how wrong that is.

Huey Long’s theme song was “Every Man a King.” It was a catchy song, with inspirational lyrics Huey himself wrote. Again, not proposing it, but if we did divide the wealth up equally, those Brookings’ statistics reveal that every man, woman and child could indeed live like a king. Would that be such a bad thing? We’d have to redefine what it meant to be a king, of course. But as Huey said, “none would wear a crown.” Wasn’t that one of the reasons for the American Revolution?

Every Man a King- Randy Newman

This whole college loan thing has triggered my populist instincts. It’s why, no matter how much I rage against the “Woke” machine, I can never really feel comfortable with the Right. I’ve heard some conservatives say, “hey, no one told you to get that loan- pay your debts!” The problem is that every one of those loans that originate from a banking institution are utterly counterfeit. Our fractional lending system now doesn’t even require the ten percent reserves they used to. They don’t require any reserves.

Which means that banks lend money they don’t have. Think about that. How great would it be to lend money to people, and charge them imaginary interest on top of that, when you don’t actually have it on hand? This is the Ponzi scheme that is behind the rigged economy. Like so much else in our world, it’s fake. So a student, or any mortgage holder, is not being a “deadbeat” by being unable to pay back the bank. In fact, the bank is coming out ahead if they receive a single payment from those who are indebted to them. And yet conservatives are so quick to call them irresponsible.

Another favorite talking point of conservatives is that “if you divided all the money up, within a short period of time, the same people would have it all.” This is, of course, a convenient and understandable position for those who have the wealth. But can you imagine the Zuckerbergs, the Trumps, the Gates, the Buffets, of the world, left to actually compete with brilliant intellects that were shackled by an unfortunate set of financial circumstances? The One Percent is not impressive in any way, shape or form. Outside of their wealth. Their wealth is what is impressive. It’s easy to become richer if you were born rich. We aren’t competing on a level playing field.

I went over the backgrounds of many of the world’s richest individuals in Survival of the Richest. Almost without exception, they came from at least upper middle-class backgrounds. And I don’t mean the “middle class” Bill Gates came from. You know, with a father who was president of Planned Parenthood, a mother that was sitting on big corporate Boards in the 1950s, and a grandfather who was a bank president. Most of these people were born on third base, and think they hit a home run, to use Gerald Celente’s clever expression.

The marketplace is totally rigged. It is corrupt. It doesn’t allow free competition, let alone revel in it. As recently as the 1970s, every job in America (outside of fast food and the like, which was indeed then just for teenagers) paid a living wage. I knew plenty of kids whose fathers worked in Sears or Montgomery Wards and the like, at non-management positions. Selling vacuum cleaners or shoes back then allowed you to buy a house, have as many kids as you desired, and your wife didn’t have to work. Today’s job market isn’t a reflection of “progress” by any definition.

The great Huey Long wanted to share the wealth. That was his campaign slogan. His proposal would have exempted the first million dollars of income from any taxation. That would be comparable to about $12 million today. Exactly who would oppose such a proposal? Other than those who make more than $12 million, I mean. Huey was not targeting the middle class, as today’s social justice warriors do. He was going after the absolute top level of the One Percent. That’s why they killed him.

Here’s Huey’s great “barbecue” speech from 1935, in which he excoriated the Rockefellers and their ilk with wit and insight. His speeches still resonate today, and the numbers he mentioned have only grown more unequal since then. None of our shamefully bad present leaders could compete with Huey Long.

Huey Long- Share the Wealth

If that bottom half of Americans have virtually nothing, then what does the introduction of millions of even poorer immigrants into the equation do? Obviously, it causes that bottom fifty percent to grow. If the top twenty percent are managing the mess for the elite at the top of the One Percent, one can do the math and recognize that all those desperately poor immigrants entering at the very bottom of the economic ladder are going to squeeze out the thirty percent or so of what’s left of the middle class. And that’s the plan, as Barney Fife used to say.

Mainstream conservatism is no answer to the present Leftist madness. The conservative mentality is to basically not recognize what has happened in this country just in this century. They still idolize Reagan, who was a lifelong open borders advocate, and made the immigration mess almost unfixable with his 1986 “reform” act. They believe that “no one wants to work.” They think that you can just walk into a place that has “job wanted” signs out front, and they’ll hire you on the spot. It doesn’t work that way, and hasn’t for quite a while.

If you want to see entitlement, watch reruns of that embarrassing reality TV show with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. Trust fund babies that have never worked, and will never have to work, a day in their lives. Unable to pump gas or even shop for groceries themselves. Or take it to the top tier of entitlement; the British Royal family, for example. Unimaginable wealth, mansions and luxury. Why? They are the biggest parasites in the world. All the mythical welfare queens put together couldn’t match their worthlessness. They are paid billions for….absolutely nothing.

The FDR type social welfare programs, while providing some safety net for the most vulnerable people in our society, ultimately fail, because they don’t address the crux of the problem, which is the massive disparity of wealth. The great socialist Eugene Debs pointed out, “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

The FDR-LBJ style programs created unresponsive and largely useless bureaucracies, while not eradicating poverty or homelessness. A Huey Long style populism, in his home state of Louisiana, basically eliminated property taxes and foreclosures, and saved the average family a substantial amount in monthly utility costs, while creating a sparkling, modern infrastructure. And Governor Long did it all while maintaining the third lowest costs of any state.

The name “conservative” indicates one who wants to conserve things. What exactly about America 2.0 is worth conserving? If you went back to the golden era of the 1950s, then there would be a lot worth conserving there. But that’s long gone. Should we conserve Affirmative Action, open borders, inaction on infrastructure upgrades, our criminal fractional banking system, the plethora of unconstitutional government agencies, the state controlled mainstream media, our neocon foreign policy, and a fraudulent electoral system, to cite just some examples? That is the establishment that previous generations of “conservatives” allowed to be built.

We need to stop worrying about what some poor soul is buying with their food stamps. Trust me, from advocating for my brother, I know how destitute you have to be to qualify for food stamps. He didn’t, for instance. Try to tell these same outraged people about the local stadium being built with taxpayer money, and they’ll give you a blank look. Try informing them about all the celebrities and rich people who get farm subsidies from the taxpayers, but never farm. All the details are in my book.

Unless you’re in that top twenty percent, managing the unfair economic monstrosity, you are a loser, and will at best be only a devastating medical emergency away from dropping down into the bottom half, where losing is really losing. Leaving aside the moral ramifications of allowing such suffering to happen in the land of plenty, there is no pragmatic reason for permitting it, either. If they have little to no income, they can’t very well pay much in taxes. They don’t have discretionary income to spend. But don’t expect conservatives to understand this. Most of them now worship Ayn Rand, who once said we had no obligation to help our neighbor.

Huey Long remarked that it wasn’t enough for those at the top to have everything. They have to know that others don’t have it. Out of this is born the jealousy we see of student loan recipients, whose lives will not be dramatically changed by forgiving $10,000 of their loans. Last time I checked the average student loan debt was over $30,000. Or the jealousy of the blue-collar worker who sees someone on food stamps with a television that is too big and too flat for someone in that situation.

Populism is the answer for the masses. The ones who are suffering under this tyrannical system, and its immeasurable corruption. Populists oppose too much concentrated power in any one place, or with any one individual. We are just as concerned about the Military Industrial Complex as we are with the Department of Education. Like Huey Long, we see the two parties for what they are; Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We want our leaders “shackled by the chains of the Constitution,” to quote Thomas Jefferson, who was a populist himself.

Forgiving what amounts to one third of an average student loan certainly doesn’t amount to any kind of jubilee. We need all debts to be forgiven. We’re about 2,000 years overdue for that. Let the banks, and the One Percent, do the sacrificing for once. It’s always the common man and woman who are asked to “sacrifice” time and time again, while the plutocrats sit comfortably in their mansions and don’t sacrifice a single stock option. Let the drumroll begin for the long awaited Year of Jubilee.