In just their latest failed effort to peel away supporters from one of the Democratic Party's most reliable constituencies, Republicans in 2012 still lost among Jewish voters by over a 2-1 margin. The reasons for the GOP's consistently dismal performance are no mystery. Survey data show that Jewish Americans overwhelmingly reject the Republicans' reactionary social policies and mockery of education and science. Worse still, many of the right's hardline supporters of Israel see God's chosen people as biblical cannon fodder needed to fulfill End Times prophecy. And then, as Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) showed this week, Republicans routinely compare Democratic positions on guns, education, health, taxes, the debt--and almost everything else--to the Holocaust.

During a speech Tuesday to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the North Carolina Republican appropriated the famous Holocaust maxim to protest federal regulation of for-profit colleges. As Inside Higher Ed reported, Foxx complained that private institutions should have joined in their defense:

"'They came for the for-profits, and I didn't speak up'...Nobody really spoke up like they should have."

For her part, Foxx was only following in the footsteps of her GOP colleague, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland (video above). Federal student loans, he cautioned last fall, weren't merely unconstitutional, but the first step to the gas chambers:

"If you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad...The Holocaust that occurred in Germany -- how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

Virginia Foxx's previous claim to fame was her high-profile role in propagating the "death panels" slander of the Affordable Care Act that became Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year. Democratic health care reform, she warned, will "put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."

And that, some Republicans suggest, makes Obamacare little different from the Holocaust. State exchanges helping to enable 30 million people in the United States to obtain insurance, Idaho state senator Sheryl Nuxoll darkly warned last week, are the equivalent of a final solution for health care:

"The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange."

As it turns out, she's far from alone in crying Holocaust over health care reform. In Maryland, the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County explained four years ago that "Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common." Last summer, Maine Republican Governor Paul LePage reacted to the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Obamacare:

"We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo -- the IRS."

LePage was not the first Republican to compare the Internal Revenue Service to the Hitler's henchman. During the GOP's successful crusade to gut the agency in the late 1990's, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott decried the IRS' "Gestapo-like tactics" while Alaska's Frank Murkowski protested, "You don't need to send in armed personnel in flak jackets."

Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee couldn't agree more.

Continue reading »

There is a great deal of angst and worry among progressives about what is going to happen in two months, when the Republicans will once again try to hold the economy hostage so they can cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and everything else in the federal budget that helps low- and middle-income folks. It is of course a bad situation when you have one branch of the government eager to blow up the economy to do bad things that more than 80 percent of Americans oppose, but we need to spend a lot less time worrying and a lot more time organizing.

We can beat these guys, and beat them badly, if we have a focused and aggressive strategy.

There are four things progressives should do right now. The first relates to the President. I understand the disappointment we're feeling about his kicking the can down the road another two months, and the leverage lost on the revenue side. And I was very critical of the President’s willingness to swap cuts in Social Security benefits for a deal in this last go-around, and will fight him with every ounce of energy if he proposes any such thing again. But right now is the worst possible time to be raising doubts about this President’s willingness to hang tough in a negotiation as some of my friends in the progressive movement are doing.

The Republicans need to know that the President is deadly serious when he says he won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, and that the entire progressive movement and Democratic party have his back on this. No negotiation whatsoever. Period and end of sentence.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (247)

PLAYS: (3260)

Embed

This is the world we live in now, folks. One where conservatives think students borrowing money from the government is an "entitlement." Back in the days when people were sane, we used to believe paying for our young people to be educated was an obligation of a healthy democracy. Now, it's all up to kids who are expected not only to pay for their college educations, but to bury themselves deep in debt to do it. Listen to George Will's arrogant pronouncement:

TAPPER: And, George, you and I were talking about this earlier. You think that we're witnessing the birth of a new entitlement, with the president's push on -- on student loans.

WILL: Well, look what happened. It's a slow-motion, almost absentminded creation of a new entitlement, exactly at the moment when the entitlement state is buckling under the weight of its already existing commitments. Five years ago, Congress says, well, let's cut in half the interest rate on certain student loans, from 6.8 to 3.4.

Wow, no brownie points to Jake Tapper for just repeating that nonsense without so much as a raised eyebrow. Entitlement? Really?

From the time our kids are in kindergarten, parents, teachers and society alike hammer home the value of their education. By the time they're freshmen in high school, they're expected to know what they want their career to be and forge a pathway to college. If they want to get into something other than a community college, they're told to stress out for the next four years, take all the AP or IB classes they can, volunteer in their communities, participate in extracurricular activities, work a part-time job, and make sure they maintain their straight As in the process.

Those who actually manage to do these things are then rewarded with acceptances to the colleges of their choice and immediately presented with a bill for anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. If they're really lucky, they might win one of the few scholarships available to shave some of the pain off that bottom line, but there are no guarantees.

If they're not, they're told they can borrow around $5,000 per year from the government, and if their parents qualify, mom and dad can borrow about $25,000 from the government to send them to that school. Here's what happens: Those kids who we pushed to achieve and qualify for those public and sometimes private university educations land in community college for a couple of years while they try to save enough money to go to a 4-year university and not go broke in the process.

If they choose the 4-year university/tuition loan route, they leave school with debt, hazy job prospects, and the sense that everything they just worked toward was a farce. Which it will be, if Will has his way.

TAPPER: 6.8 to 3.4, yeah.

WILL: We'll do it, they said, temporarily. Well, now we're coming up against the expiration of that, and they're saying, well, let's temporarily move it on yet again.

TAPPER: But Romney supports that, as well.

WILL: I understand that. And that's why this is a bipartisan example of how entitlements -- because once you do this, once you extend it again, you'll never go back to 3.4 percent.

SMILEY: But when -- but when -- but when student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt, and we want to label that an entitlement, we don't call corporate welfare an entitlement. I just -- I don't see...

WILL: Of the two-thirds of the people who graduate from college with debt, the average debt is something under $30,000 total. That is just about the one-year difference in earnings between a college graduate and a high school graduate. We're talking about a pittance a month (ph).

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: But, George -- but if we give interest-free loans to bankers, why not interest-free loans to students, George?

WILL: Let's not give interest-free loans to anyone.

At last! Something I agree with George Will about. Truly, let's not give interest-free loans to the banks, and let's not make students and their struggling middle class parents break under the weight of student loans. Instead, let's recognize that this country has always believed that educating our children is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and start paying for it again the way we have in the past.

The reason Will and his ilk argue against student loan interest rate breaks is simple: They want to control which students have access to a college education. Their preferred flavor of student is a conservative one. They truly believe educating those librul ingrates who show up at Occupy protests or dare to question the status quo are unworthy of an education. If conservatives could choose which students got a college education, they'd be the very compliant sons and daughters of fine, upstanding, churchgoing types. The ones who qualify for Koch scholarships.

The ones like people in my family who protested the Vietnam war, went to college in the days when the University of California was tuition-free, and then dedicated themselves to public service for their entire career? They need not apply if their voter registration says "Democrat."

I'm completely serious about the need to return to the values that made this country great, and those values include assuming the costs for educating our young people and making sure they have the finest education possible in order to innovate, create, and shape a new, better, more equal world. Enough of the philosophy of educating only caretakers for the oligarchs.

Not only should there be no interest charged on student loans, there should be no student loans. It's as simple as that.

DOWNLOADS: (182)

PLAYS: (547)

Embed

Rep. Todd Akin is in a primary race to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill for her Senate seat in Missouri. Akin is also a hardcore Americans For Prosperity corporate candidate and all-around not-nice guy. But even for a not-nice corporate guy, this comment of his at a recent debate was so deeply out of touch with reality that it deserves some attention, even from the President.

Here's what he said:

America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in. So first, to answer your question precisely, what the Democrats get rid of the private student loans and take it all over by the government was wrong, it was a lousy bill, and that’s why I voted no. The government needs to get its nose out of the education business.

Please take note of the following facts which Akin doesn't care about but which the rest of us should:

1. Education is not a business. It's how civilized countries invest in remaining civilized. I repeat: Education is NOT now, nor should it ever be, a business.
2. Federally guaranteed student loans were the brainchild of the Republican God of Economics, Milton Friedman. Friedman argued that there was too much risk to private lenders, therefore:
   

   But whatever the reason, there is clearly here an imperfection of the market that has led to underinvestment in human capital and that justifies government intervention on grounds both of "natural monopoly," insofar as the obstacle to the development of such investment has been administrative costs, and of improving the operation of the market, insofar as it has been simply market frictions and rigidities.

   [...]

   A governmental body could offer to finance or help finance the training of any individual who could meet minimum quality standards by making available not more than a limited sum per year for not more than a specified number of years, provided it was spent on securing training at a recognized institution. The individual would agree in return to pay to the government in each future year x per cent of his earnings in excess of y dollars for each $1,000 that he gets in this way.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (155)

PLAYS: (750)

Embed

Stuart Varney and David Horowitz are having fun in this clip bashing liberals, liberal students, and liberal arts students in particular, for the insane level of outstanding student debt in this country in response to a reasonable proposal by Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) to forgive student loans after students have paid 10 percent of their income for ten years on them. Before I lash them with my mighty keyboard, let's just review some facts about student debt, specifically with regard to public universities. Because I'm from California, I'm going to use California public universities as an example.

In 1960, University of California regents adopted a 246-page master plan for higher education (PDF). Part of that plan expanded on the original master plan for state colleges and universities by providing that every student accepted to a University of California or California State College (back then Cal State schools were colleges, not universities) would be granted a scholarship equal to the costs of their education. In addition, subsistence grants were to be given to students who needed them. Students were selected for admission from the top 1/8th of high school classes for the UC system, and the top 1/3rd of graduating high school classes for the Cal State system.

In other words, students who were California residents and who met the admission requirements would not pay tuition and the state would provide some help with their housing costs if necessary. In fact, that was affirmed in the master plan on page 31, which provides for "the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the state."

And then Saint Ronnie was elected Governor in 1966. He set about right away to "clean up" UC Berkeley and get rid of those pesky anti-war protesters. In his view, they should love it or leave it, and if they didn't leave it, he was perfectly willing to price them out of the soon-to-be free university market.

Reagan's war on the UC system was an economic one. If he couldn't tear gas unruly students, he'd just make sure they paid for their education. And with that, he ended free tuition in the UC system. As he brandished his pen, he declared that "the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity."

Today, the individual costs to students for the state "not subsidizing intellectual curiosity" is about $4,000 per quarter plus living expenses of about $3,000. This is at a University of California system school. For Cal State universities, the costs are about $4,000 per semester plus living expenses of about $4,000 for the same length of time. So for one full school year, a UC school will cost around $27,000 and a year at a Cal State school can range from $8,000 to $16,000, depending on whether the student lives at home. Most UC campuses require at least one year of on-campus living, but Cal State universities have no such requirement.

University endowments, Pell Grants and work-study programs help offset tuition for some students, but come nowhere near the total cost to attend a state university, much less a private one.

That history brings me to this amazing conversation between David Horowitz and Stuart Varney over the "student loan crisis." It is true that student debt balances are high, but that is due to two entirely preventable factors. First, Reagan and his Republican minions used California as the blueprint to destroy public universities across the country, forcing students to take federally guaranteed student loans in order to cover the costs of a higher education.

Continue reading »

UPDATE: Further information being released indicate this story might not be true. We are investigating. - eds.
UPDATE #2: Though the original news source has taken down the original article after the Dept. of Ed. denied that the raid was due to unpaid loans, but instead "fraudulent" activities, they've updated the story as follows:

After the Department of Education raided the home of a Stockton man Tuesday morning, officials said the search was part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Kenneth Wright, after retaining a Sacramento lawyer, gave News10 the full original search warrant he was given by federal agents Tuesday.

DOCUMENT: Search Warrant

An official with the U.S. Department of Education returned phone calls to News 10 Wednesday morning, saying the search warrant is part of a criminal investigation and not because of unpaid student financial aid loans.

However, the official would not say why the department is investigating the Wrights.

At 6 a.m. Tuesday, Wright said he woke up to what he thought was a S.W.A.T team breaking down his door. As Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts, he said the officers barged through his front door.

RELATED STORY: Questions surround feds' raid of Stockton home

Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

"He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there," Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children, ages 3, 9, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

"They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said.

As it turned out, the person a team of federal agents were looking for - Wright's estranged wife Michelle - was not there.

Even with the caveats that this was in the investigation of criminal activity, the actions seem excessive to me. Cryn Johannsen writes on why this story is resonating fear on both the left and the right.

The use of force by the Department resonated with countless readers. Many of them wrote on Facebook pages and tweeted, "It's scary. What if that happened to me?" . . . "I'm close to defaulting on my loans. Will the Department break down my door?"

We all know that there is no way out of this debt, especially if you fall on hard times. The system has been rigged in such a way that allows companies, like Sallie Mae, to benefit from keeping people in debt. Sallie Mae has $146 billion of federal loans on its books. One analyst said, "They have this cash cow which is the legacy portfolio." Hear that, folks? They are making money off of indentured educated people! Make no mistake - they don't want this 'cash cow' to go away. No one talks about the fact that FFELP is still alive. The administration might have put an end to it, but those loans are still out there and part of these loan sharks' portfolios. So, if you default on any federal loans, you're life is pretty much ruined, whereas the IRS has the power to resolve issues with distressed taxpayers. Both parties can come up with a solution and move on. Student debtors have no such luck. But since we're seen as a 'cash cow,' why would anyone in power want that to change? I'm sure those guys over at Sallie Mae , who live in luxurious mansions on the east coast don't want this to change. Neither do the schools. They all control the money, whereas the rest of us are victims of these hucksters. But I digress.

Second, the use of such excessive force was uncalled for. Why an individual who is being sought for fraud warrants a SWAT team -- as it was originally reported -- suggests how far right this country has moved.

Continue reading »

The Wall St. Journal with a look at rising student loan defaults. One physician who borrowed $250,000 for medical school now owes $550,000 - thanks to penalties and interest:

To be sure, Dr. Bisutti's case is extreme, and lenders say student-loan terms are clear and that they try to work with borrowers who get in trouble.

But as tuitions rise, many people are borrowing heavily to pay their bills. Some no doubt view it as "good debt," because an education can lead to a higher salary. But in practice, student loans are one of the most toxic debts, requiring extreme consumer caution and, as Dr. Bisutti learned, responsibility.

Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can't make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.

Yet many former students are trying. There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues—and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means that payments and interest are halted, or in "forbearance," which means payments are halted while interest accrues.

The real kicker with this doctor? "The entire balance of her federal loans will be paid off in 351 months. Dr. Bisutti will be 70 years old."

Bad system. One good way to counteract profit-centered health care in this country would be for the U.S. government to underwrite medical school instead of having student take out these onerous loans. The creditors say most medical students repay their loans on time, but I wonder: How many of them are practicing assembly-line medicine to make those payments?

It's funny how things just slip away from the grasp of this administration, isn't it?

There's no reason in the world why those loans should be serviced by profit-making companies -- except for those morally craven members of Congress, of course:

WASHINGTON — Four months ago, it appeared all but certain that the White House and Democrats in Congress would succeed in overhauling the student loan business and ending government subsidies to private lenders.

President Obama called the idea a “no-brainer” last fall, predicting it would take billions of dollars from the profits of private lenders and give it directly to students, and many colleges were already moving to get loans directly from the federal government in anticipation of the next move by Congress.

But an aggressive lobbying campaign by the nation’s biggest student lenders has now put one of the White House’s signature plans in peril, with lenders using sit-downs with lawmakers, town-hall-style meetings and petition drives to plead their case and stay in business.

House and Senate aides say that the administration’s plan faces a far tougher fight than it did last fall, when the House passed its version. The fierce attacks from the lending industry, the Massachusetts election that cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and the fight over a health care bill have all damaged the chances for the student loan measure, said the aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.