Steve Forbes, The Olympics, Congress and Other Stuff For-Profit Colleges Buy With Your Tax Dollars
America’s for-profit colleges are receiving as much as $33 billion in a single year from your tax money, and billions more from the pockets of students, a lot of whom are left deep in debt and jobless from their encounters with predatory schools. Many of the biggest for-profit colleges get close to 90 percent of
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Mitch Daniels & Mike Mullen Should Tell For-Profit Colleges Hard Truths, or Else Stay Home
Last year, the annual convention of owners and executives of for-profit colleges (University of Phoenix, The Art Institutes, Kaplan, etc.), held in Las Vegas, featured paid speakers George W. Bush and Michelle Rhee, and, for entertainment, a fake knockoff version of Creedence Clearwater Revival. After a year in which the truth about their shoddy practices finally sent
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Who Built Senator-Turned-Dirty Energy Lobbyist Trent Lott? You Did
Far too often in Washington, policy decisions are influenced by big money — wealthy corporations spend millions on lobbying, public relations, and campaign contributions to get their way. Big money helps explain why your cell phone and cable TV bills are so expensive, why small investors are still unprotected from Wall Street abuses, why taxpayers
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Senators Demand Probe of For-Profit College Circumvention of Student Loan Default Rules
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
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For-Profit College Industry’s Phony Pitch to Obama: Now We’re BFFs!
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
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VIDEO: Rep. Shuler Said He Wouldn’t Become A Lobbyist; Now He Will
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
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‘Persistence Matters, Public Engagement Matters’: House Democrats Dare To Reform Campaign Finance System
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
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Whitehouse At Senate Judiciary Hearing: If We Can Ask Soldiers To Go To Afghanistan, We Can Ask The Koch Brothers To ‘Put Up With Some Impolite Blogging’
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
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