Eight U.S. Senators today sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calling on him to investigate tactics used by some major for-profit colleges to circumvent rules aimed at reducing student loan defaults. A report issued in July by Senator Tom Harkin’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee documented that several big for-profit colleges were misleading and harassing students to convince them to place their loans in “forbearance” or “deferment” status so that the schools would not have to report their student loans as in default. Federal law takes away a school’s eligibility for student financial …
The controversial for-profit college industry, threatened by the Obama’s Administration’s efforts to hold it accountable for a torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse at the expense of students and taxpayers, bet heavily on a Romney and GOP victory in 2012. The industry, which gets $32 billion a year from taxpayers and whose biggest players get 86 percent of their revenues from federal funds, gave millions of that money to Republican candidates and Super PACs. This was on top of the tens of millions the industry has spent on lobbying, lawyering, and advertising to defeat the Obama reforms.
So, having bet …
In July, then-Republic Report bloggers Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani taped an interview with Congressman Heath Shuler, Democrat of North Carolina. Shuler had announced he would retire from Congress at the end of the current session. Concerned about the revolving door culture and its corruption of our politics, our reporters asked Shuler whether he was planning to become a lobbyist after retiring. Shuler flatly told them no.
Yesterday, Duke Energy announced that it “has named Heath Shuler as senior vice president of federal affairs, effective Jan. 4, 2013…. Shuler will be based in Duke Energy’s Washington, D.C. office.” In other …
Yesterday, House Democrats held a press conference outside of the capitol building along with Public Campaign, a campaign finance reform group. Their goal was to issue a D.A.R.E to Congressional Republicans encouraging them to act on campaign finance reform.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. James Clyburn, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen all joined Public Campaign in calling for a constitutional amendment overturning the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United.
D.A.R.E is intended to highlight key areas that need to be addressed when trying to ameliorate the U.S. campaign finance system: disclosing donors, amending the constitution, reforming campaign finance …
On Tuesday, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing called “Taking Back Our Democracy,” examining special interests’ increasing grip on American politics and policy, especially focusing on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Two panels of witnesses, including both current lawmakers and activists, testified to a friendly panel of Democratic senators (no Republicans appeared to have shown up) that our democracy is under siege.
That sentiment was no surprise to anyone in the room (over 400 people showed up for the hearing, packing the room and causing spillover to another room). Again and again, testimonies confirmed that while money has …
One person who is probably happy about the attention the Supreme Court is getting for its pending Obamacare decision is Attorney General Eric Holder, who, by any measure, is having a really bad week. Later today, the House of Representatives is likely to hold him in contempt of Congress because he has refused to hand over documents related to “Operation Fast and Furious” to the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The gist of the story is this: The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been charged with the Sisyphean task of stopping guns from being trafficked from …
Why would a leader with a good reputation affiliate himself with an industry that has a bad reputation? If you’ve visited this website before, you might suspect that money is involved. And you’d be right.
On May 29, the New York Times published an editorial calling for government action to address spiraling college debt. The Times editorial noted that, with respect to one type of school, for-profit colleges, “a staggering 54 percent of those who had borrowed to pursue a bachelor’s degree had dropped out” and that dropouts from such schools were more likely to be jobless.
A few days later, the …
Before June 18, the Senate is expected to vote on a proposal to repeal recently-issued safeguards on mercury and other toxic chemicals released by U.S. power plants. Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.) claims to have the support of 29 of his colleagues in undoing these Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates — 30 being the magic number to force a full vote on the issue according to Senate rules. But Inhofe won’t name his supporters in the Senate, despite the protests of the National Resources Defense Council.
While we will eventually find out just who these 30 lawmakers seeking to undermine public …
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