Friday Open Thread [5.31.13]

Yesterday, there was a protest at the Sallie May HQ down in Newark:

They carried signs, chanted and sang as they marched to Sallie Mae’s offices before the company’s annual shareholder meeting. They came demanding to meet with company leaders in hopes of airing their concerns with rocketing student loan debt. “We were sold degrees that aren’t worth what they were worth,” said Sara Fitouri, a first year law school student at the University of Denver who is $145,000 in debt. “We don’t believe students should have to pay those debts.”
The students were successful in getting company officials to agree to a sit down meeting with leaders. Sallie Mae Board Chairman Anthony Terracciano told the students they would get their meeting, but not today because company leaders were all busy in board meetings.

Student Debt is a problem, but the solution is likely more complex than not paying the debt. We have to remember that colleges have lost huge amounts of state funds over the past 30 years, and students have been making that up. There are other drivers of the cost of higher education, (including purely competitive ones and ones targeted at parents who are looking for WAY more amenities — not necessarily educaton — than mine would have cared about), but addressing student loans is low-hanging fruit that should be an easy fix. I’m still a fan of fixing loan rates to the rates that banks pay to borrow money from the Fed — and Elizabeth Warren idea.

Added because the headline is awesome: The GOP Is Too Juvenile to Govern It’s true, of course, and it is still a crime that the Democrats can’t hang this fact around their collective necks better.

This completely slays me — Phyllis Schlafly is having NONE of the GOP outreach to minorities. NONE of it, I tell you:

Schlafly told PolicyMic she believes that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election because “his drop-off from white voters was tremendous” and the GOP doesn’t “know how to relate to grassroots Americans.”

“The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path,” Schlafly said on the radio program. “There is not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican.”

This seems to be a wingnut thing –that somehow there were just tons of white people who didn’t show up to vote for the white guy, or something like that. But this is in line with their basic innumeracy — ignoring the demographics that simply don’t support them.

What interests you today?