Friday, December 26, 2014



Student Debt and Default Explode While U.S. Department of Education Fiddles

A new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) examined what steps it had taken from fiscal years 2011 through 2014 to improve student debt and loan repayment rates.

In a nutshell, a big fat nothing—and taxpayers will be stuck paying off tens of billions in bad loans as a result. According to the OIG:

The Department’s outstanding student loan debt portfolio more than doubled in the last 6 years, from $516 billion at the end of FY 2007 to $1.04 trillion at the end of FY 2013. Based on the most recent official cohort default rate information published by the Department, 1 in 10 borrowers who were required to begin repaying their loans in FY 2011 defaulted on their student loans within 2 years and about 1 in 7 borrowers defaulted within 3 years. (p. 1)

Here are some other troubling statistics:

As of June 30, 2014, nearly 40 million borrowers had outstanding student loans totaling about $1.1 trillion that were either held or guaranteed by the Department. (p. 4)

Based on information contained in the Department’s FY 2015 Budget Proposal, graduating seniors with student loans held an average of $29,384 in combined private [not federally subsidized] and Federal student loan debt in award year 2011-2012, 27 percent more than the average combined debt of $23,118 in award year 2007-2008. (p. 4)

Total private and Federal student loan debt is currently the second largest form of debt in the nation, behind only home mortgages. (p. 4)

Borrowers are defaulting on their Federal student loans at the highest rate since 1995. (p. 4)

We’ll recall that back in 2010 Education Secretary Arne Duncan was blasting heavily subsidized private lenders and insisting that federal “direct lending” through his department was a better plan. Nearly two years later, student debt continued to balloon. We also know that the “cohort” default rate used by ED underestimates the actual student loan default rate significantly—a fact the OIG admits in a footnote (p. 5, n. 8). Also buried in a footnote is this disturbing fact:

According to estimates contained in the Department’s FY 2015 Budget Proposal, the Federal government will not be able to recover between $0.04 — $0.13 of every loan dollar (calculated on a cash basis and excluding collection costs) that goes into default. (p. 5, n. 9)

Given that outstanding loan debt now tops $1.04 trillion, that works out to anywhere from more than $40 billion to over $135 billion each year, plus who knows how much more in unspecified collection costs.

Making matters worse (but hardly shocking as far as government bureaucracies go) the OIG found:

The Department does not have a comprehensive plan or strategy to prevent student loan defaults and thus cannot ensure that default prevention efforts conducted by various offices are coordinated and consistent. (p. 13)

[The Department] did not explicitly establish default prevention activities in the 2009 TIVAS [Title IV Additional Servicers] contracts or adequately monitor calls to delinquent borrowers. (p. 18)

The Department now has 30 days to come up with a corrective action plan. While we wait with bated breath for that one, we’ll be piling on all those billions of dollars in bad government-held student loan debt to our public debt. According to a 2012 Council on Foreign Relations report:

With a pair of new laws in 2008 and 2010 [the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act of 2008 and the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, or SAFRA], Congress fundamentally changed the student loan market, making the U.S. government the sole supplier of Federal student loans, rather than just the ultimate guarantor. In itself, this does not affect the government’s net debt,” noted the CFR. “This new direct lending does, however, add to the gross debt held by the public. The $1.4 trillion in direct federal student loans that will be outstanding by 2020 will amount to roughly 7.7% of gross debt. This is 6.3 percentage points higher than it would have been had the scheme not been nationalized.”

The feds nationalized student loans under the guise of eliminating the middle man to keep college costs down (it hasn’t). Just days before SAFRA passed the House, Duncan took to the press, preaching:

We’re not asking the taxpayers for one single dollar. We’re simply making the choice to stop subsidizing banks, to invest our young people back here.

SAFRA sponsor Rep. George Miller (D-CA) was similarly breathless, and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gushed that this federal lending takeover was a cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s overall “fiscally sound,” deficit-reducing 2010 budget.

So here we are today. Technically, Duncan was right: we’re not paying one single dollar. We’re paying tens of billions of them.

SOURCE





Common Core: Leftist and Islamic indoctrination

The fundamental transformation of the United States is a euphemism for destroying American values and traditions fostered by an unholy alliance of America's radical left and militant Islam, in essence, to take down the country from within.

This totalitarian marriage of convenience is distinguished by the traits they share - their hatred of Western civilization and a belief that the United States is the embodiment of evil on earth. While Islamic radicals seek to purge the world of heresies and of the infidels who practice them, leftist radicals seek to purge society of the vices allegedly spawned by capitalism -- those being racism, sexism, imperialism, and greed.

Central to the success of the America-haters is "submission," either to the state or sharia, and a rejection of the belief that individuals "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

That is, the core of Western Judeo-Christian ideology maintains that the individual, through the exercise of his or her reason, can discern the Divine Will and seek "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" unmediated by commissars and mullahs.

In response, America's domestic enemies promulgate notions that attack the basis of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, which emphasizes the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual. They also promote policies that weaken the ability to transmit to the next generation the values and traditions upon which the United States was built.

Anti-American, messianic political movements can only succeed when the individual believes that his or her actions are determined, not by personal destiny endowed by the Creator, but by the destiny of the community, endowed by a ruling elite.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a one-size-fits-all, top-down national education system, embraced by Democrats and big government Republicans like Jeb Bush, does just that, turning schools into re-education camps for leftist and Islamic indoctrination - as most universities and colleges already are.

Under Common Core students are asked to rewrite sentences containing subliminal anti-American messages such as "The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all" and "he (the president) makes sure the laws of the country are fair" and "the wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation."

Presumably, that includes blind obedience to Obama's unconstitutional executive orders, an acceptance of Marxist-style wealth redistribution and a dilution of the Bill of Rights.

Todd Starnes of Fox News reported that a high school in Farmville, North Carolina, promotes Islam and the Prophet Muhammad in a Common Core vocabulary assignment handed out to seniors in an English class.

The worksheet says: "In the following exercises, you will have the opportunity to expand your vocabulary by reading about Muhammad and the Islamic word."

One sentence reads: "The zenith of any Muslim's life is a trip to Mecca." For using the word "erratic," the lesson included this statement: "The responses to Muhammad's teachings were at first erratic. Some people responded favorably, while other resisted his claim that ‘there is no God but Allah and Muhammad his Prophet."

Another section required students to complete the following sentence:

"There are such vast numbers of people who are anxious to spread the Muslim faith that it would be impossible to give a(n)___ amount."

This is not the first controversy caused by Common Core. One assignment asked students in California to question the Holocaust. Another lesson teaches a messianic view of Barack Obama, while a third falsely claims white voters rejected Obama due to race. A Common Core lesson taught in Arkansas asked students to remove and replace two amendments from an allegedly "outdated" Bill of Rights.

Courtesy of the Obama Administration, Common Core has become both a means to remove parents and the local community from the educational process and a vehicle for leftist and Islamic indoctrination, designed not to teach children how to think, but what to think.

Consequently, unless such anti-American brainwashing is stopped, future generations may not only lose their liberty, but they may, quite literally, get their heads handed to them.

SOURCE





Ratbag CUNY newspaper editor Gordon Barnes calls for violent war to be waged on police

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A DISTURBING editorial in a City University of New York (CUNY) grad-student newspaper calls for rioters protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to arm themselves and wage violent war with cops.

“The time for peace has passed,” says a revolutionary editorial titled In Support of Violence that was penned by editor-in-chief Gordon Barnes in the December 3 issue of The Advocate.

“The problem with the protesters’ violence in Ferguson is that it is unorganised. If the violence was to be organised, and the protesters armed — more so than the few that sparingly are — then the brunt of social pressures would not be laid onto middling proprietors [of looted small businesses], but unto those deserving the most virulent response of an enraged populace,” Barnes writes in the CUNY Grad Centre’s publication.

“The acts of looting, destruction of property and violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary,” says Barnes, a doctoral student in history who once studied in Cuba.

The New York Post reports that the editorial — illustrated in the online version with the circled, capital A that symbolises anarchy — also urges rioters to emulate the Black Panthers and Malcolm X instead of Martin Luther King and other advocates of nonviolence — and hopes the unrest will morph into a revolution.

“The violence against property, that is destruction and theft, is only an unorganised form of something with the potential to be far more revolutionary and inspiring,” says Barnes, who is paid from $10,000 to $20,000 a year as a graduate assistant and who also pockets an annual stipend of $24,000 as a Presidential MAGNET fellow, according to his LinkedIn page.

The screed was posted online the same day a grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner’s death, which is mentioned in an online note but not in the original editorial.

It also ran 11 days before CUNY Professor Eric Linsker was busted on assault and other charges for attacking cops at a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, and 17 days before two NYPD officers were assassinated by a madman in Brooklyn seeking revenge for the Garner and Brown killings.

The 1861-word, densely written and jargon-filled diatribe ultimately issues a direct call for more violence in the streets.

“What is needed now is to take the next step from indiscriminate attacks to ones directly pointed at state power as well as at the lackeys and apologists who allow it to prosper,” says Barnes, who also studied at Instituto de Filosofía de Cuba and is a graduate of the Valley Forge Military Academy and Temple and Rutgers universities, his LinkedIn page says.

The paper added a disclaimer at the end of the piece, saying the views are Barnes’ only.

CUNY Grad Centre President Chase F. Robinson condemned the editorial.

“While freedom of speech must be protected, and the views expressed by the editor in chief of this student newspaper are stated as sole views, we deplore calls of any kind for violence. As Martin Luther King’s birthday approaches, we should instead recommit ourselves to nonviolence as the true path to social justice,” Robinson said.

SOURCE


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