Greenpeace has posted these stark images of the destruction Sandy brought to the New Jersey shore. The devastation on the ground is heartbreaking, and Americans are grateful for the courage and determination of people responding to the crisis. At the same time, it’s imperative that we start asking why we have seen so much extreme weather lately — and what kind of leadership it will take to truly address the crisis.
In the wake of the disaster, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, “There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement. That is …
Is Mitt Romney “severely conservative,” as he put it during the primary season, or is he instead the semi-compassionate moderate he has portrayed since the first debate? It’s the question pundits keep asking, and of course it’s important to his political strategy and the outcome of the election. But to understand how Romney would actually govern as president, this dichotomy obscures a critical point.
If you look beyond Romney’s stump remarks – dig beneath the Etch A Sketch — to the structure of his campaign and the details of his policy proposals, it appears that Romney’s true ideology is not small-government conservatism, or …
Former Missouri Senator Jim Talent has emerged as a key policy advisor and public surrogate for Mitt Romney, and he is “regarded by insiders as a contender for a Cabinet-rank position if Romney wins the election,” maybe even Secretary of Defense. Just this morning, Talent appeared 0n MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” to preview Romney’s debate performance and criticize President Obama’s handling of the economy, the federal deficit, and the Middle East.
At the same time, Talent runs a big DC lobbying firm that represents major corporations, like the coal industry.
Last fall, the Romney campaign released an energy policy paper that …
Lorna Hernandez taught graphic design and animation for eighteen years at a for-profit college, The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, until she quit, last Thursday.
Unlike some of her faculty colleagues, Hernandez, chair of the school’s animation department, was not laid off in last month’s major downsizing by Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corp. (EDMC), the publicly-traded corporation that owns her school. But Hernandez says she “saw the writing on the wall”: She believed more firings were ahead, and the school’s quality standards, in her view, were rapidly declining.
For the past couple of years I’ve been puzzled by the Art Institutes.
On the one …
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in Charlotte today for the Democratic National Convention; he delivered an aggressive speech this morning to his state’s delegation, sharply criticizing the Republicans. But even in far-away Charlotte, Cuomo can’t avoid the growing chorus back home calling on him to reject the controversial natural gas extraction process of hydraulic fracking.
While Cuomo’s Administration has delayed its final decision, it signaled in June that it was preparing to allow fracking in five counties in the southwest part of the state. A strong grassroots citizens coalition is growing in those counties and across New York state, concerned that fracking …
You can fault the for-profit college trade association APSCU for many things, but not for loyalty. APSCU sticks by its members.
In May, the FBI raided FastTrain College amid allegations of fraudulent marketing practices. In June, 20 state attorneys general forced marketing company QuinStreet to shut down GIBill.com, a website that deceived countless veterans into believing they were on a government site that offered unbiased education advice, when in fact the site shilled for for-profit colleges. Both FastTrain and QuinStreet were and remain members of APSCU.
Now the Justice Department has filed a 47-page civil complaint in federal …
Huffington Post published this piece by me yesterday, as part of its Shadow Conventions series:
To grasp the harms caused when money dominates politics, start with for-profit colleges. This industry tripled in size during the last decade, spurred by deceptive recruiting practices, after its lobbyists loosened federal rules aimed at protecting students and taxpayers from fraud. It has become a monster, a league of Wall Street corporations and private equity-owned firms that get 86 percent of their revenues — $32 billion a year — from taxpayers.
While some for-profit colleges are honest and work to educate their students, many charge sky-high …
I have a piece today on Politico proposing a new approach to the abuses of for-profit colleges. Here’s an excerpt:
The for-profits have used our taxes to finance a race to the bottom: the more you abuse students, the more money you make. Their wealth may doom to failure the current approach to regulation, which has created benchmark after benchmark that schools must flunk to lose federal aid. Not only has the industry schemed to weaken and evade such tests, but also it has exploited opportunities to gain sympathy and support from non-profit and state colleges, when new rules add greater …
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