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Capitol Latino

“Politics, Culture, Reporters, Thieves”

23 September 2009 Tood Akin Supports No Position I Take

Yesterday, I received an email from my congressman (MO-1) reaffirming that he is unabashedly horsewhipped by his political party’s (business) leadership and inexhaustibly determined to remain among history’s many meat-headed American political asterisks. From the email:

Last Thursday I voted against legislation (H.R. 3221) which would have put the federal government in charge of nearly every aspect of the student loan process. College students and their parents have been familiar with the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program for more than forty years. Through this program, the government guarantees student loans made through private lenders – and, in return, the lenders offer students reduced interest rates. Students also have the option of getting a loan directly from the government – that’s the direct lending (DL) program.

This year alone, $70 billion in loans were made through FFEL and just $22 billion through DL. It seems that students, their parents and colleges / universities find that DL customer service is pretty bad and so they would prefer to work with private lenders. Yet, bit by bit, the federal government has been playing favorites – offering loan forgiveness to DL borrowers but not students who get financed through FFEL and reducing interest rates to the point where lenders have dropped out of the FFEL program.

So, when it comes to student lending, there is a free market and a “public option.” Turns out the free market is more popular with students – but that hasn’t stopped Washington from giving every advantage to its direct lending “public option.” Now, after 40 years, the Obama administration wants to eliminate the private lending option and put the 78% of student loans that are made through FFEL under complete government control.

There’s a saying: The government competes with the private sector the way an alligator competes with a duck: it consumes it. Which leads me to wonder: if we create a “public option” for health care, just how long will it be until the government-run program completely swallows up its private competition?

Gimme a fucking break, dawg. Ducks? What the fuck do Republicans care about ducks? Akin writes this shit like he voted to protect small helpless businesses. I’d admire and might even support the man if he told me the truth: that he voted to whore my ass to multi-billion dollar banking conglomerates already balls-deep and raw in my generation’s present and future.

Akin is proud to serve as a pawn on the board — nice to have today, but expendable tomorrow for the Kings, Queens, Bishops, etc. In moments like these, I’m thankful that nothing is expendable to historians. The foul deeds by today’s Cheneys & Madoffs will tomorrow employ scholars with lifelong tenure in the academy. That said, that tomorrow’s sharpest scholars & hobbyists make minions like Todd Akin eternally synonymous with oaf and scum.

Ducks? Fuck ducks.

UPDATE: Afghanis perhaps better-appreciate the immortality chronicle can offer.  From Rory Stewart’s excellent (so far) The Places In Between (2004):

[His Excellency, Yuzufi, in the Foreign Ministry] stood up from behind his desk and gravely enfolded my hand.
“Record me in your book. As the Persian poet says: ‘Man’s life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever.'” (22)

Also–

…Abdul Haq looked at me with his dark eyes and asked, “You’re not a journalist, are you?”
“No.”
“A pity; otherwise you could write a story about us.” (24)

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