Two noted shills for the banking industry – Republican Lamar Alexander and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal – just trotted out the “socialism” boogeyman, so here we go again: another lie, another con, another ripoff. “School loan socialism” is the new Death Panel. But, hey, somebody’s gotta keep Sallie Mae’s corporate jets flying.
Alexander’s op-ed for the Washington Post is a buzzword symphony, a scare-tactic sonata, a cascading chorus of Pavlovian terminology designed to elicit the predictable autonomic response. “Starting in July,” he writes, “all 19 million students who want government-backed loans will (cue scary music here) line up at offices designated by the U. S. Education Department.” (It’s more likely they’ll go online to make their selection. But that “lining up” sounds so Stalinist, doesn’t it?)
