"What a harebrained campaign in view of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic" - those were my first thoughts as I came upon the offer above.
I mean, here is a company reaching out to a demographic of Americans that is saddled with debt. And now, as countries around the world are quarantining, it wants those same Americans to travel and risk substantial medical bills if exposed to the virus in consequence.
Then I did the research. As it turns out, the advertisement predates the coronavirus outbreak by at least a few months.
Unfortunately, the advertisement is still disturbing.
Let us start with the headline; it suggests that those who pursued higher education as told, despite being fed into a buzz saw of higher-education price gouging, might be able to just "fly away" from the tremendous sum they are being asked to pay.
Before we continue, let me explain how that was supposed to work; the price of an education was set based on the maximum that students were still willing to pay after being shown the salaries they were expected to have in result. In the meantime, the government stepped forward to foot the bill using invisible money which, for the last several decades, is pretty much the only way any middle-class person could afford to go college - using invisible money. But now we are in a situation where opportunities after graduation are extremely limited. The government still expects that invisible money back and wants to earn interest on it. According to a recent study, 99% of those who apply for loan forgiveness are rejected. Student loan debt now totals $1.7 billion, which the government is hunting down through its loan shark and loan-servicing proxy, Navient.
Unfortunately, jetBlue's "fly away" language is just a gimmick to catch the eye of those who are desperately looking for a way out of the trap set by their own government and people. We know it is a gimmick because, observing the rest of the ad, we see that jetBlue is not canceling loans, but working with SoFi to reapply the chains of debt slavery on its own terms, to collect interest payments that otherwise would have just trickled back to the government, all the while imposing new conditions to rake in even more loot.
Because jetBlue owns an airline, it wants the indebted to have flight-booking incentives. Perhaps the campaign is an effort to swap out a reliance on the globe-hopping, aging middle class for a new, cash-strapped demographic that might be enticed to fly around regardless.
Of course, travel vacationing - even slutcationing - is hardly cheap, even with discounted airfare. There are plenty of other costs involved, including intercity transportation, accommodations and leisure activity costs. So, what we really have is a scenario where a wealth-starved demographic is being pushed to spend more, which means any debt owed to jetBlue and SoFi will take even longer to pay off, and thus more interest will accrue on the loan in the meantime. What a coincidence. 😙
It is probably not a coincidence, of course. Nor is it likely a coincidence that the "help" being given to the indebted, cash-strapped demographic involves an incentive to do what supports the service, tourist and luxury industries - all have much to lose if the new generation does not rise to become the sort of frequent customer base that the last generation was. And why should they? Look where they are after two decades of higher-education price gouging, mass labor import, job outsourcing, automation and, now, the sort of "help" that creates a fiction so the economy remains unchanged and sets a new debt trap to replace the old one. Here is who you can thank for her "help":
Of course, that sort of "help" is so incredibly symbolic; as shown, it features lies, manipulation, exploitation - just like what we got from the government when it pillaged us and started using our debt not to help us, but to finance the trillion dollar military industrial complex, send free aid to Israel, foster illegals, investigate nonsense impeachment and Russia hoaxes and help our rivals expand their economies. Of course, the government spent much more than just the interest on our student loan money on these causes. It drove up trillions of its own debt (for a live counter, click here):
Note that the figures above exclude the two trillion dollar relief bill that was just signed to further bail out companies in the midst of the COVID-19-causing coronavirus. By the way, $50 billion of that package alone will go to airlines, like jetBlue.
My how different things used to be:
The more you discover, the more it is clear just how savagely we have been exploited. And so I wonder: if everybody just stopped paying into the Sallie Mae loan-shark scheme run through Navient - assuming they even try a reboot after September - what would happen?
