We didn’t start the wars, we didn’t wreck the economy --
WE WON’T PAY WITH OUR FUTURE!
The options that we face as students today are grim: educations we cannot afford while there seems to be no end to tuition hikes; debts we cannot manage while there are few prospects of meaningful employment when we graduate; classes we cannot get into while necessary services are being cut. This is not the reason that we worked as hard as we did to get here, so that we could mortgage our futures on empty promises and be left staring wildly ahead to decades of permanent indebtedness and soul-crushing jobs, if we’re lucky. University diplomas are barely worth the paper they are printed on--they are no longer passports to a better life. The insanity is that this is the new normal.
This would be heartbreaking enough if weren’t an alibi for naked graft and theft. Banks have made billions from student loans and credit cards. Corporations have gotten rich off the research that we do in laboratories on campus. Most universities sit on substantial endowments which are literally pumping billions of dollars into banks and corporations and the returns on that money have dwindled to a trickle. The Chancellors, Provosts, Presidents, Regents (how many different permutations of “king” do we need in university administration?) make salaries that are so out of touch with the work that they perform and never an indication of their failures of being effective “managers.”
To add insult to injury politicians pretend that they care but they make no secret of the fact that they have no solutions. Every election is the most important election of our lives, but things have only gotten worse as both major parties have pushed agendas to keep the rich rich and to put our interests on the chopping block. Neither stewards of the economy or the environment, they have made sure that the world we have inherited is wracked with war, racism, and fear. Our entire conscious lives have been lived under the shadow of war and the fear of a wrecked economy.
We can no longer sit and wait for the politicians and the corporations to fix the problem; increasingly it is clear that they are the problem. The endless quest for wealth is what has ruined the economy; their endless drive for power is what keeps us at war. Neither party will have a plan to solve this problem, because the problem is global and systemic: every country in the world is another Greece, Tunisia, and England waiting to happen.
We do not believe that socialism is a bad word. The idea that we ought to live in a world where education is free, where people have access to health care and social security, where it shouldn’t take decades before LGBT people have equal rights, where ordinary people make the decisions about the issues that effect them, and where we don’t go to war to help corporations get rich is neither scary nor utopian. It is our right and it ought to be our future, too.
JOIN US FOR A DISCUSSION ABOUT WHY SOCIALISM IS BACK ON THE AGENDA …
Wednesday, September 14, 7pm
Aegean Room - University Center (UC) @ University of Houston Main campus
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