Sallie Mae Forgives the Debt of Dead Marine, But the Living Only Get a Forbearance
An interesting article was making the rounds on the news blogs and social networking sites yesterday, and since it’s been one those issues that has been dividing people, I can’t resist throwing my two cents in. Here’s the scoop…
Last summer, Second Lieutenant Ian McVey got his orders. He was to go to Iraq as a platoon commander with the Second Combat Engineer Battalion of the Second Marine Division. On July 19, not long before his unit was to ship out, McVey’s motorcycle was blindsided by a car driven by an 84-year-old woman near Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed instantly. He was 23 years old.
John McVey went through his son’s things. Cluttered bureau drawers. Photographs and memories. He also had to settle Ian’s college loans. He wrote to the lenders, asking that the debts be forgiven. Two wrote back, saying they would forgive the loans.
The third, Sallie Mae, the government-created college loan provider that privatized its operations in 2004, refused. John McVey then wrote a very personal letter to Sallie Mae…Sallie Mae responded with a computer-generated letter that, aside from a “Please accept our condolences for your loss” stuck in the middle, was a demand for $53,144. There was no name on the letter. John McVey’s attempts to get a human being to talk to him about this have been met with computer-generated voices.
From there, the article’s writer questions, and rightfully so, how the government can hand billions of our tax dollars to Sallie Mae to keep it afloat and then not forgive this debt, insignificant by comparison. It’s pretty standard practice to forgive the debt of students if they die before paying it back, as the other lenders did, but Sallie Mae is a different breed of lender. Having dealt with these loan sharks myself the past 6 years, I can relate to Mr. McVey’s plight. It’s extremely difficult to get through to a real person, and when you do, they’re about as sympathetic as their robotic coworkers. A lawsuit back in 2005 by a former employee of Sallie Mae revealed that they’ve made a common practice of granting forbearances on loans rather than helping students lower their monthly payments to reasonable, payable levels, thus burying students further in debt while they struggle just to make minimum payments. That lawsuit was never really resolved, and I guess that’s why they were able to do this very same thing to me. I couldn’t afford to pay monthly payments to both AES and Sallie Mae, so Sallie Mae offered to consolidate all my AES loans so that I could pay just one reasonable monthly payment. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, so I signed my life away, only to find a month later that I still owed over $800 a month. When I called to ask why, they said that my AES loans couldn’t be consolidated with my other loans because they were a different type of loan; so basically, I was in the same boat all over again, except this time, they controlled all my debt. My interest rates continue to rise as I put forbearances on the old AES loans that I can’t afford to pay while I continue to go broke making the other payments. It’s a blast, I assure you.
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| Sign right here, Mr. Faust. |
This brings me to the other side of the argument. The article in question is guilty of several logical fallacies. First of all, we get the implied, “If you support the troops, then you must support John McVey’s position,” as if his son’s life was worth even more just because he happened to be a marine. Then he hits us with the consistent appeals to emotion, asking you to put yourself in the father’s shoes and think about the greedy, heartless corporation versus the poor, grieving parents. And finally, the article just ends with a punchline rather than a list of important facts, like how the government has to pay the family for the loss of this marine (despite not being killed in combat), and how the insurance company of the driver must award the family money as well. They probably co-signed these loans, which technically makes them at least somewhat responsible for them. While I’m sure the McVeys are just as broke as the next American family, these are important facts that any real journalist would have at least mentioned before loading his paragraphs up with one-sided opinions. Blogs seem to have been created almost specifically for that purpose, but newspapers need to save that for one section of their paper only – the editorials.
Despite these glaring issues, the article hit its emotional mark – within hours of the article’s publishing, Sallie Mae forgave every last cent of the debt, and even offered to help the McVeys’ other son with his education loans. They claim the entire thing was just one big misunderstanding…
Sallie Mae officials said the letter should not have been sent. “Somebody hit the wrong button,” said Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae. “The wrong letter was sent. Somebody should have handled this differently. It wasn’t handled appropriately. We didn’t live up to our service standard.”
Yes, I’m sure somebody just pressed the “Cold, Detached Robot” button instead of the “Give Free Money Away” button. That happens all the time. So now that Sallie Mae has done their publicity damage control, where does that leave the rest of us? Not to be cruel, but do I have to die to see some fucking relief? That $53,000 remains unpaid, so who do you think has to pay that amount back now? Taxpayers get a chunk, but the rest falls on those, like myself, still drowning in debt and rising interest rates. Every time one person doesn’t pay theirs back, Sallie squeezes the rest of us just a little bit harder to make up the difference. Many investigations into Sallie Mae have revealed their shady and sometimes illegal practices to extract blood from every stone, and with Sallie having a virtual monopoly of the student loan business, it doesn’t show signs of stopping any time soon. What the media has turned into a cut-and-dry David and Goliath story is really just another passing-the-buck bullshit-fest. I mean, I’m glad somebody got through to these assholes, but at what cost? It’s pretty bad when “faking my own death” has been added to my list of financial options. If I start posting under the name “Logan,” you’ll know why.
Tribune Co. Files for Chapter 11
Via LA Times
In perhaps the starkest sign yet of trouble in the news business, media giant Tribune Co. — owner of the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and other newspapers and TV stations — filed Monday for bankruptcy protection from creditors.
Tribune is far from being the only troubled media company. In the last week alone, the New York Times said it would mortgage its Manhattan headquarters for as much as $225 million to help cover operating costs, industry leader Gannett Co. pushed ahead with the layoff of 2,000 employees, and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the Miami Herald were put up for sale.
When you think about it, the financial problems of the mainstream news corporations that deal heavily in print are only being accelerated by the current financial state - not created.
Does anyone under the age of 30 subscribe to a local paper, get it delivered, and read it daily, or even weekly? The younger segment of the country is going purely digital more and more, and will eventually mean the “death” of newspapers. By the time any major paper prints a story, I’ve read about it 20 hours earlier - online. Traditional print media outlets should be planning for their switch to a purely digital format immediately, if they haven’t already.
In terms of local papers, I can only speak for the one I have experience with. The Scranton Times is, in a word, pathetic. A large chunk of it is simply republished AP articles, and the rest is… sloppy, at best. I can only assume that much of the local papers across the country function in much the same way.
Now, we still need large media outlets that have the budget to maintain a staff of writers, editors, and quality control employees. The only thing worse than sloppy news is false news. Blogs are great for opinion, but there needs to be reliable sources that can maintain a certain degree of strictly factual reporting, in contrast to the “truthiness” of our wiki-world. Much of the news we report on even at MuckMakers can, in one way or another, be traced back to a major media outlet. However, the printed paper format has already begun its slide into relative obscurity.
Mumbai Terrorists May Teach Us Nothing, But Can a Wal-Mart Stampede?
The hottest new name in terror, the Deccan Mujahideen, have reminded us this Thanksgiving to be thankful for at least one thing – that the FBI sucks at making predictions. It seems that New Yorkers were more in danger of getting trampled by overeager shoppers than getting blown to bits by suicide bombers…
A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.
People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.
It just goes to show you where America’s priorities lie. Granted, we should never, ever give into the fear-mongering of the United States government and just stay indoors all our lives, but I guarantee that not one of those shoppers even knows that Mumbai is a fucking city, yet they could name every product on sale at every retailer in the area. It’s interesting that all the mainstream media can talk about is how businesses are collapsing and people are cutting their spending, yet we still haven’t learned a damn thing about what’s really valuable in life. In the end, the holidays just bring out the worst in our people, exemplifying the greed of our consumer culture that only contributes to our worldwide image as…well…a bunch of a greedy consumers. When September 11th happened, we expected the entire world to stop and mourn with us. Then we expected them all to unconditionally support our plans for revenge, despite the fact that most of those plans didn’t even involve punishing those responsible. Now Mumbai, a crowded metropolis that serves as India’s financial capital and one of the world’s top ten commercial centers, is suffering heavy losses from a terrorist attack, and even though the parallels between Mumbai and NYC are strikingly similar, it seems the world hasn’t stopped for those people either.
We cling so hard to tradition in this country that we refuse to see how much these consumers truly hinder our progress. Our ancestors were insatiable conquerors who ignored the common good of humanity for personal and financial gain. They stole the land and used slaves to cultivate it, and when they weren’t killing each other for gold and oil, they were standing complacent as bankers and industrialists bought up this nation and divided it amongst themselves. Then they raised these new gods up on a pedestal, toiling endlessly every day at menial jobs in hopes of someday ascending to the upper class and achieving their American dream. We’ve become so competitive and so obsessed with gaining a bigger piece of that pie that we don’t even notice when we push our own to the ground and trample them in the process, and in this case, I mean that quite literally. Even scarier is the fact that some of these people really knew that he was down there, that with every step they took towards discounted toys and cheap undergarments, they were actually stomping the life out of another human being, another guy who was just going to work that day. They filled shopping carts and complained of long lines as police and paramedics pushed through the unforgiving throng in hopes of saving his life. And instead of the manager of that Wal-Mart shutting that store down right then and there, telling these depraved shoppers that the life of this man is just a tad more important than Christmas gifts for their ungrateful, snot-nosed little brats, he just worked a register or pointed customers toward the shoe department. Maybe he knew that this probably would have started a riot, that even as a man fought for his life just a few feet away, more violence would be worth the cost of a sale-priced iPod to these people. Maybe he knew that Wal-Mart would have fired him for cutting into their profits by shutting down this Mecca of commerce immediately. (They did, eventually, close, but not before finishing up a good portion of their transactions.) But I can tell you for sure that no matter what he was thinking, he will go home to his family this Christmas. Jdimypai Damour, 34, an everyday Joe who was working for Wal-Mart through a temp agency, maybe to make some extra money or maybe because he was just desperate for work like some many other Americans, will not. My condolences go out to a family who will never look at Black Friday the same way again.
The rest of my thoughts are with the citizens and visitors of Mumbai. It’s sad that because the small-minded people of this modern age refuse to evolve past destructive religious ideologies like Islam that you’ll have to suffer as we did, and it’s even sadder that these victims will be just as easily forgotten. What remains in our minds instead are the temporary joys of ripping open colorful paper wrapping to find store-bought gifts that will be omitted from memory by the following year. Sure, my friends and family will receive Christmas presents from me this year as they do every year, but I’m proud to say that I didn’t buy anything today. It’s not much of a protest really, but it shows a bit more maturity than I’ve had in the past. I hope that America can someday wake up and age as gracefully.
Most Expensive Thing. Ever.
This is unconfirmed at the moment as I haven’t had the chance to personally dig up each figure, then adjust it for inflation, but the graphic over at Voltage Creative is scary stuff. In a nutshell, it illustrates in pie graph form how the cost of the 2008 Bailout equals the following:
- The Marshall Plan
- The Louisiana Purchase
- Moonshot
- S&L Crisis
- The Korean War
- The New Deal
- The Iraq War
- The Vietnam War
- NASA’s all time budget.
Now, I’m no economist. But - seriously?
The Week in Muckmaking: 11/23/08
Every weekend, we highlight some of the scandals you may have missed in a post we like to call “The Week in Muckmaking”…
- The Wall Street Journal did an interesting report on atheists and freethinkers across the country trying to get noticed by advertising their lack of faith on billboards, hosting friendly meet-ups, and staging a Freethought Day. As polls continue to show that atheists are quite outnumbered in America, they also note that faith in organized religion is declining rapidly. As they mention in the article, Christians are all insulted by this and want to squelch all this dissent as quickly as it arises. This quote, in particular, was priceless…
Atheists “are talking to a very small slice of the population,” said Mathew Staver, a leading Christian conservative and law-school dean. “In some ways, they’re really just talking to themselves.”
That’s funny, coming from a guy who speaks to an invisible deity in the sky on a daily basis. It’s disheartening that in 2008, we’re still fighting for just basic acceptance. Our ideas may be offensive to you, but it should be no more offensive than the Jews or Muslims are to your beliefs. The vitriol is unnecessary and exposes more about your lack of faith than it does mine. I think it will be a slow and painful process towards a freethinking nation. England’s been at this a lot longer and they still haven’t shaken it off completely yet, so we’ve obviously got a while to go.
- Good ol’ Justice Scalia is making headlines again with his latest interpretation (re: bastardization) of the Constitution, which he espoused at a Federal Bar Association dinner in Houston. Not only did he criticize those who view the Constitution as a “living document” that must evolve and adapt to the times (even though it was clearly tailor-made to do just that), but he also said, “I fear the courts’ use of foreign law in interpreting the Constitution will continue at an accelerated pace,” complaining that foreign laws were cited to strike down anti-sodomy laws in Texas. For a Supreme Court justice, he seems to understand very little about the foundation of our justice system. Most of our basic laws were based on English common law (the founding fathers weren’t completely original), and Scalia himself has cited English common law regularly, such as in his dissent of Boumediene v. Bush. But, like all conservatives, he lives by only one law – “Do as I say, not as I do.”
- I’m quite sick of reading about the Hillary Secretary of State story already, but this headline brightened my day - Obama to Tap Clinton After Thanksgiving. I mean, it spares Bill from having to do it, but shit, man, you can do better than that. A lot of people are critical of Obama’s pick, but you’ve got to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and if she was his enemy in the Senate, I think he’d be getting a lot less done. And Hillary can be one hell of an ally, especially in women’s rights issues. Bush was trying to push religion back into health care in a last-minute stab against pro-choice advocates, but Hillary was already on top of it. There’s some change I can believe in.
- In the “What took you so long?!” department, Dick Cheney, as well as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, have been indicted by a Texas grand jury over their investments in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the prison companies running those federal detention centers we keep hearing so many great things about. Not only has it been well-established that Cheney has known about and approved of the unlawful torture in said prisons, it seems that he had something to gain financially from them as well. There’s a conflict of interest if I ever heard one. District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra has been doing his best to push this thing forward, but it’s already hitting a wall because of the presiding judge. You know as well as I do that no one can touch Darth Cheney - if nothing came of the Halliburton scandal by now, this has no hope of going anywhere. A valiant effort, though.
- And finally this week, the U.S. is expected to spend more on defense in fiscal year 2009 than the next 44 highest-spending countries combined. Conservatives, the military, and arms manufacturers are pushing an agenda known as “Four Percent for Freedom,” a misleading title that implies that if we don’t spend 4% of our GDP on hopeless wars that nobody wants (except those who profit), then we must, of course, hate freedom. The only freedom we need to be pushing right now is freedom of thought. Here we are in the middle of a deep recession and economic crisis and all the warhawks can think about is how many more toys they’ll get to buy for Christmas this year. Thanks to Crooks and Liars for bringing this story to my attention, as I’m sure this fight is far from over, even with a Democratic president.
