Ronald Reagan Created Student Debt Because He Hated UC Berkeley
Ronald Wilson Reagan Credit: PING NEWS
I hate Ronald Reagan. A lot of people say that they hate Ronald Reagan, but they don’t really know why. They know that Reagan was evil, but they don’t grasp just how truly malevolent this fucking man was. He wasn’t just a Republican. He was a monster. If I could resurrect someone from the dead, I’d resurrect him, just so I could watch him die again. If Ronald Reagan got hit by a bus, I’d be jealous of the bus driver.
American capitalists hate the working class. Today it’s harder to tell because they’ve gotten really good at pitting us against each other over petty differences like race, religion, sexuality and gender.
In case you didn’t know, American capitalists hate the working class. Today it’s harder to tell because they’ve gotten really good at pitting us against each other over petty differences like race, religion, sexuality and gender. However, when the elite were amongst themselves, they were candid about their intentions. This was especially true in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. There are even recordings of Nixon and Reagan making racist remarks about African delegates who were at a United Nations meeting.
To understand what got us in the student debt crisis in the first place, we have to rewind the clocks back to the ’60s. The 1960s was a time when leftists were emerging in many of America’s cities, and the San Francisco Bay Area was at the forefront of the revolution. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood buzzed with youthful ideas for a more equitable future. North Oakland birthed the Black Panther Party, but nowhere seemed to embody the spirit of the youthful leftist intellectual more than the UC Berkeley campus. That was the nucleus of the rebellion.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite. We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” – Roger Freeman
While the young were tripping on acid and taking to the streets to demand an end to the Vietnam War, the parents and grandparents of these very same people were scarred that communism had infected the brains of their impressionable offspring. In comes Ronald fuckin’ Reagan, who makes opposition to the University of California system a focal point of his campaign when he ran for governor. Unfortunately it worked and he became the Governor…
His attacks on higher education weren’t by accident. In 1970,UC Berkeley was nearly tuition free for California residents. Roger Freeman, an advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as reported by The Intercept, stated “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite. We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained unemployed people.”
Reagan took Freeman’s advice to heart and increased tuition at the University of California. Reagan later became President of the United States. What do you think happened?
Now, long after Reagan’s death, we’re still in his era. His ghost looms over nearly every aspect of American political life. Access to higher education has been weaponized and commodified. Rich kids are allowed to learn while poor kids are trapped with shitty jobs and if they do aspire to educate themselves, they’re likely to be enslaved by debt. This is Ronald Reagan’s legacy on American education. We’re in Reagan’s Hell.
Considering how much shit we allow our government to get away with, I find American machismo kind of funny, especially the conservative variety. They brag about working hard for little pay and not complaining. But if they were really that tough, our government wouldn’t drown us in debt just because we wanted to learn. They’d take their guns and point them directly at the people who were fucking them in the first place, but they won’t do it because they’ve been conditioned into denying that their butts hurt in the first place.
I’ll end this article with a song by a man much smarter than I: Killer Mike.
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