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Skeptical Debunker

Arne Duncan: Move Our Money From Banks to Students - 0 views

  • The president's student aid reform plan will save tens of billions over the next decade. We'll use these savings to make college more affordable for the next generation of engineers, teachers, and scientists who will become the backbone of the new economy. The House has passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. This legislation will end bank subsidies and invest in students directly. The Senate is still working on its bill. The House bill will increase Pell Grant scholarships to $5,710 in the next fiscal year. It will guarantee that Pell Grants keep pace with the rate of inflation. It will eliminate unnecessary questions from the financial aid forms, making it faster and easier for students to qualify for federal grants and loans. This legislation also promises an historic investment in community colleges, helping these essential schools take Americans from all backgrounds and equip them to succeed. Finally, it will improve the quality of early learning programs, which are critical to America's educational success. All of this will be possible by eliminating the student loan subsidies. We will end the loans under the Federal Family Education Program and make them directly to students -- just as economist Milton Friedman proposed 50 years ago, and just as the Department of Education has been doing since 1993 through the Direct Loan Program. For future lending, we have hired experienced companies to service all new student loans and collect them for us. We selected these companies through a competitive process. The shift is underway, and it is proving to be a remarkably smooth transition. In the past two years, our Department has issued more than $50 billion in student loans. Over 2,300 colleges and universities participate in the direct lending program -- an increase of 1,300 over the past three years. It's time to do what's right for taxpayers -- move our money from bankers to students.
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    President Obama has a plan to move our money from banks to students. Every year, taxpayers subsidize student loans to the tune of $9 billion. Banks service these loans, collect the debt, keep the interest, and turn a profit. When borrowers default on their loans, taxpayers foot the bill, and banks still reap the interest. It's a great deal for banks and a terrible one for taxpayers.
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    Yet another government sponsored "socialistic" "redistribution of wealth" from taxpayers to big business. It's time to do away with it.
thinkahol *

SWAT team launch dawn raid on family home to collect woman's unpaid student loans | Mai... - 0 views

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    A father was dragged from his home and handcuffed in front of his children by a SWAT team looking for his estranged wife - to collect her unpaid student loans. A stunned Kenneth Wright had his front door kicked in by the raiding party at 6 am yesterday before being dragged onto his front porch, handcuffed and led to a police car with his three children. He says he was then detained for six hours while officers looked for his wife - who no longer lives at the house. Scroll down for video
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Student Debts, Stunted Lives | | AlterNet - 0 views

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    A thought to keep in mind as you read this - what happens to the already overburdened graduate whose job gets outsourced, and then can't find another because he's deemed "overqualified" for the low skilled, low wage jobs available? Answer: Look up "capitalization of interest" and then note that one can't erase student loan debt by declaring bankruptcy. What will result will be the mathematical equivalent of charging compound interest on a loan that the graduate has been deprived of the means of repaying.
thinkahol *

Can the Fed Prevent the Next Crisis by Eliminating Interest on Student Loan Debt? | Tru... - 0 views

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    Among the demands of the Wall Street protesters is student debt forgiveness - a debt "jubilee." Occupy Philly has a "Student Loan Jubilee Working Group," and other groups are studying the issue. Commentators say debt forgiveness is impossible. Who would foot the bill? But there is one deep pocket that could pull it off - the Federal Reserve. In its first quantitative easing program (QE1), the Fed removed $1.3 trillion in toxic assets from the books of Wall Street banks. For QE4, it could remove $1 trillion in toxic debt from the backs of millions of students.
Omnipotent Poobah

Meet Tony Soprano, New CEO of First Premier Bank - 2 views

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    First Premier Bank is making the leap into legalized loan sharking with a new credit card offering a $300 credit limit for $256 in first year fees, a $29 late fee, and a $75 annual fee thereafter. Oh, and they want to charge 79.9% interest on the outstanding balance just to sweeten the pot.
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    Amazing, how without and regulation or controls the thieves can do anything they want. Anyone for busted kneecaps, compliments of deregulation!
thinkahol *

Ten Million Families Sliding Toward Foreclosure » Counterpunch: Tells the Fac... - 0 views

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    President Obama, he says, "seems to be playing a sly double game-protecting banks from sharing the pain while proclaiming sympathy for embattled homeowners." Greider adds, "The government, in effect, has been sheltering banks from facing the hard truth about their condition." Banks may be valuing mortgages or mortgage bonds at 85 cents on the dollar when their true market value is closer to 30 cents. "That strengthens the case for a general and orderly write-down now: if many of these loans aren't ever going to be rapid, then the assets now claimed by the banks are imaginary."
Bakari Chavanu

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For | Politics News | Rolling Stone - 0 views

  • Some economists have proposed running a job guarantee through the non-profit sector, which would make it even easier to suit the job to the worker. Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions. Sounds nice, doesn't it?
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      Jeremey Rifkin's The End of Work proposes this idea.
  • What if people didn't have to work to survive? Enter the jaw-droppingly simple idea of a universal basic income, in which the government would just add a sum sufficient for subsistence to everyone's bank account every month. A proposal along these lines has been gaining traction in Switzerland, and it's starting to get a lot of attention here, too.
  • A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."
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  • Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve.
  • In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own – which won't even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate.
  •  Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone.
  • Hoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. "Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      Defines capital stock
  • You know what else really blows? Wall Street. The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses. It is difficult to overstate how completely awful our finance sector has been at accomplishing that basic goal. Let's try to change that by allowing state governments into the banking game.
  • There is only one state that currently has a public option for banking: North Dakota.
  • When North Dakotans pay state taxes, the money gets deposited in the state's bank, which in turn offers cheap loans to farmers, students and businesses. The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market.
thinkahol *

Fed wants to strip a key protection for homeowners | McClatchy - 0 views

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    WASHINGTON - As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms.
David Corking

Media Release - NCUA Conserves U.S. Central and Western Corporate Credit Unions March... - 0 views

  • The central short-term objective of NCUA’s Corporate Stabilization Program has been to increase liquidity in corporate credit unions. Since the NCUA Board first began taking stabilization actions, liquidity has demonstrated marked improvement. The reliance on external borrowing has declined from $11.8 billion to $2.1 billion. NCUA believes that the actions to conserve the two corporates, in tandem with established plans to enhance liquidity and generally stabilize the corporate network, represent the most cost effective and prudent alternative available to the credit union industry.
    • David Corking
       
      Everyone seems to agree that the issue with the CU system is liquidity (being able to turn loans or bonds into cash). This is smaller, and much more easy to fix, than solvency problems that have damaged much of the rest of the financial system. (Solvency is having more assets - such as loans and bonds - than liabilities - such as customer deposits.)
thinkahol *

The Money Party - The Essence of our Political Troubles | The Economic Populist - 0 views

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    The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us. As 2008 approaches, The Money Party is working hard to maintain its perfect record. It is not about Republicans versus Democrats. Right now, the Republicans do a better job taking money than the Democrats. But The Money Party is an equal opportunity employer. They have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. Democrats are as welcome as Republicans to this party. It's all good when you're on the take and the take is legal. This is not a conspiracy theory. There are no secret societies or sinister operators. This party is up front and in your face. Just follow the money. One percent of Americans hold 33% of the nation's wealth. The top 10% hold 72% of the total wealth. The bottom 40% of Americans control only 0.3% (three tenths of one percent). And that was before "pay day loans."
thinkahol *

In Japan, Capitalists Fall Out of Love With Free Markets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Japanese executives were outraged at the prospect of banks taking losses on loans to the company that produced a nuclear catastrophe. This used to be how free markets worked.
thinkahol *

Robert Scheer: Obama's Fatal Addiction - Robert Scheer's Columns - Truthdig - 0 views

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    If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year-and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate-has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy." What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE's total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and, according to The New York Times, for the past three years 82 percent of the company's profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits. That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines." Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it
Bakari Chavanu

toledoblade.com -- - 0 views

  • He believes our economic system has lost its way after decades of perversion by greedy politicians in Washington and money-minded fatcats on Wall Street and in corporate America.
  • And as the great American dream slipped further from the middle class, more consumers relied on credit cards and loans to catch it, and a system based on people buying what they need became one in which people buy what they want but often cannot afford.
  • Perhaps the film's most powerful statement is Moore's claim that 1 percent of the richest Americans own 95 percent of our nation's wealth.
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  • Capitalism: A Love Story contends that such a movement has already begun. Families being evicted from their homes by bank foreclosures refuse to leave, the film shows, even when law enforcement shows up. A successful workers' strike in Chicago proved that the power to overcome corporate greed and mishandling still rests with the people.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This may be a hopeful way to look at it, but I really doubt it. Most people don't have a clue about what to do. There's very little or effective organized resistance.
  • The film isn't so much Moore piling on our battered, bruised capitalism as it is loaded commentary on what got us here. The evidence is damning, and thought-provoking to those who will give the film a chance.
  • Perhaps Capitalism: A Love Story will be the impetus we need for wholesale change. Or if change is too ambitious, given our circumstances, the film should at least spark meaningful dialogue and rigorous debate, something Moore supporters and detractors alike should welcome.
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