Who's Idea Was This Anyway?

Meiko Kaji - The Flower of Carnage
David Sarasohn has a column in today's paper about the rising student debt load this country is carrying, now over one trillion dollars. It's a succinct, sarcastic, essay as perfits someone with the name of Sarasohn. But I'm wondering how we got in this state, which leads me to who is benefiting from this? The schools are benefiting right now, but what are they going to do when this house of cards collapses? The small percentage of students who manage to graduate and find a job that pays well enough for them to pay off their loans in short order, let's say no longer than it took them to get their degree, these students are benefiting. Right now the bank's are benefiting but when the default rate hits 50%, which I am sure it will, they're going to be crying in their beer unless they will be able to get the US Federal Government [tm] to bail them out. So the only people who are benefiting from this catastrophe in the making, the only ones who haven't signed up for the long term, are the loan arrangers at the banks. Hard to believe that a bunch of salesmen would be able to put together enough clout to arrange something like this, but maybe it's that age old lure of easy money (it has a very strong appeal).
    I am beginning to think that this is the kind of thing that pushes a country toward civil war. It may not happen for 50 or 100 years, or we may find someway to compensate for our foibles, but I think these kind of systemic problems are what lead to deep schisms.
    The situation in the USA reminds me more and more of old Japanese Science Fiction movies where there are no good guys, there are only different flavors of bad guys. It's a kind of fatalism.

Update November 2015. Replaced missing video.