Call me a hopeless dreamer, but there ought to be a rule in politics banning anyone who caused a crisis from later bitching about the crisis. For the last four years, we’ve witnessed the Republicans, who voted for every Bush-era spending bill and irresponsible tax cut, crapping their cages over the size of the resulting deficit and debt — again, a deficit and debt that they themselves created without uttering even a shrug of protest during eight years in which a surplus transformed into a record deficit. Not a word — except to condemn the Democratic president who was unfortunate enough to inherit the chaos.

Likewise, as we observe the mayhem surrounding the dueling “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the Republicans, true to form, are tripping over each other in a mad dash to scream “Impeach!” into the next nearest cable news video camera. There’s only one problem: when it comes to the IRS situation and the AP phone debacle, the Republicans created the chain-reactions that led to these scandals.

Let’s begin with the IRS scandal first.

While it looks really, really bad for one of the most feared agencies within the Democratically-controlled executive branch to have been exclusively scrutinizing conservative groups, we only need to rewind to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United decision to figure out why all of this is going on. The conservative Roberts court not only opened the floodgates allowing unlimited and unregulated corporate money to flow into campaigns, but it also blurred the line between independent 527 political groups and non-profit social welfare groups, which are classified with the designation 501(c)(4). These social welfare groups can also apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS, a designation that used to be the strict privilege of groups that didn’t engage in political speech. But since Citizens United, it’s much more challenging to determine which social welfare groups are dealing in predominantly political speech.

So the IRS is faced with the unenviable challenge of filtering out groups that are stepping over the line and flagrantly abusing the social welfare moniker.

Now, yes, I get it. The IRS staffers shouldn’t have used exclusively right-wing search terms to weed through the applications. They should’ve broadened the criteria to include terms across the political spectrum. But without the conservative, pro-Republican movie created by the infamous Citizens United group in 2008, not to mention the conservative, Republican-affiliated Supreme Court deciding in its favor, we might not be talking about this right now. Furthermore, the Republican-created deficit and the subsequent histrionic demand for austerity led to government cut-backs, including at the IRS where, within the Exempt Organizations Division, the staff has been significantly reduced, thus increasing workloads. Toss into the mix a considerable rise in tax exempt applications and there it is: a formula for negligence. Thanks, Republicans.

On to the AP scandal.

Right off the bat, it might surprise you to learn that it was a cabal of 31 Republican senators who demanded the investigation that eventually led to the subpoena of the AP’s phone records. So there’s that.

In a broader sense, however, I can’t help but to laugh whenever I hear a Republican scream about government overreach on national security and civil liberties. For eight years, the Republicans established an infrastructure under the banner of fighting evildoers at home and abroad — an infrastructure that included a wide variety of trespasses against civil liberties.

They seized phone records from reporters without subpoenas, they spied on liberal groups, they established the usage of body scanners and heightened security measures at airports, they loudly and in some cases tearfully demanded the ability to wiretap American citizens without warrants, they passed the USA PATRIOT Act and ultimately created the modern American surveillance state. The Bush era gave us this counter-terrorism Frankenstein, and now they’re suddenly alarmed about it.

But now that they’re not longer in charge, they melodramatically collapse onto their group fainting couch every time the Justice Department or the president ventures into the same territory — or, ironically enough, whenever the president doesn’t do enough along those lines. Whatever the Obama administration does, they’re against it. And so it is with the AP phone records situation. Once again, as with the IRS scandal, the cries for investigations and even impeachment are loud and plentiful.

For example, Bush’s former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the AP phone records situation by saying, “It’s reprehensible conduct.” This is the same attorney general who took over a Justice Department that had seized phone records from four journalists — without subpoenas — without even flinching. Mukasey was also directly involved with warrantless wiretapping of Americans citizens. And when it appeared as if Congress might pass legislation preventing this egregious activity from continuing, Mukasey literally burst into tears during a speech in which he demanded the power to continue the eavesdropping program or else there would surely be another 9/11. I’m not making that up.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the post-9/11 fear-mongering and massively exaggerated counter-terrorism hysteria manufactured an atmosphere of capitulation and resignation to flagrant government overreach and violations of privacy and personal dignity.

And who’s to blame for the fear-mongering? People like Matt Drudge, of course, who aided in the effort to scare the crapola out of us about the so-called “terrorist threat” and yet ran a screamer headline on his front page in which he cleverly conflated the AP story with wiretapping: “GOVT TAPS PRESS PHONE RECORDS FOR MONTHS.”

But during the Bush years, Drudge, along with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and the highest ranking Republican officials in Congress, demanded that all of Washington buy into the notion that you can’t have a Constitution if you’re dead. How do we know this? Well, because they actually said it. Over and over. A few examples for the record:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” Rush Limbaugh

Now, years later, these very same Republicans insist that “Big Sis” (Drudge’s nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano) and the “little black man-child” are forcing us to “grab the ankles” and submit to fascist authoritarian policies. Never mind that all of these policies were invented by Republicans and ballyhooed by Drudge in an atmosphere of manufactured fear during conservative control of, well, everything.

Throughout the duration of the Bush years, any and all opponents of these policies were shouted down as being with the terrorists — undermining American security and endangering the troops, while evildoers were lurking under our beds ready to spring forth and crash airplanes into everything. In those years, patriotism was defined by the speed and vigor by which we gave up our civil liberties in lieu of a lot of extra security. This mantra was defined, branded and codified by the Republican Party.

The post-9/11 maxim “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists” wasn’t the concoction of Michael Moore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano. It was entirely the purview of the Drudge-ruled authoritarian universe of fear and cowardice. And make no mistake: cowardice is precisely what it was — cry-baby cowardice masked by flag-waving machismo in support of a military-industrial-security complex that earned billions in profits on investments ranging from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the production and deployment of body scanners. Rather than standing firm and upholding American values, the far-right embraced cowardice and set us on a course that’s become so deeply embedded into our political culture that it’s going to take many more years to unravel.

So as you observe the coming months and years of brain-melting scandal coverage surrounding these topics, blame a Republican. It’s okay. They deserve it.

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The Obama Administration has found itself in yet another scandal this week after it was revealed that law enforcement officials had obtained records for the telephone lines of journalists at the Associated Press. From the NYTimes:

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.

Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P was not amused and wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr calling the seizure a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its operations and told him that “there can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.” He continued: “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by The A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

A Justice Department spokesman said that the agency was “always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.” The JD’s reference to the ‘public interest’ referred to the complicated CIA operation in Yemen that was attempting to thwart a plot by Al-Qaeda to attack a US bound airliner. From the Huff Post:

On May 7, 2012, AP reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, citing anonymous sources, reported that the CIA had thwarted a plot by an al-Qaeda affiliate to “destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

The AP acknowledged then that it had agreed with the White House and CIA requests “not to publish” its story “immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” But “once officials said those concerns were allayed,” the news organization went ahead with its story rather than wait for the Obama administration’s official announcement.

It was later revealed that the “would-be bomber” was actually a U.S. spy planted in the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. On May 18, U.S. and allied officials suggested to Reuters that the leak to the AP had forced the end of an “operation which they hoped could have continued for weeks or longer.”

Regardless of public safety threats, media freedom advocates are maintaining that the ability of the press to maintain confidential relationships with their sources should be protected at all costs.  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released the following statement:

“The media’s purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance. The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again…..

Obtaining a broad range of telephone records in order to ferret out a government leaker is an unacceptable abuse of power. Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy, and that freedom often depends on confidential communications between reporters and their sources.”

And the Newspaper Association of America issued a statement saying:

“Today we learned of the Justice Department’s  unprecedented wholesale seizure of confidential telephone records from the Associated Press. These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

The Obama Administration’s record on civil liberties is becoming increasingly worrying - the NDAA, the Material Strikes Law and drone strike policy all point to a general disregard for basic constitutional rights, and make it difficult to argue that Obama is any better than the Bush Administration in this regard. Government attacks on press freedom is nothing new – the Bush Administration launched broad initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources, but this is no excuse.

Obama was elected in part to put a stop to the egregious abuses of executive power by the Bush Administration. Instead, it appears to be upping the ante.

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They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that’s the case surrounding news that the IRS targeted tea party groups as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt status has resurrected a familiar debate about government overreach and abuse of power.

As of right now, it’s unknown whether the IRS was acting on the behalf of the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party. What we do know, however, is that it’s not the first time something like this has happened. We also know that the Democrats have almost universally condemned the actions of the IRS, as they’ve done when the congressional Republicans and, naturally, the Bush administration used the nearly unlimited might of the government to engage in similar investigations — or worse. And we know that the lock-step party, the Republicans, spent eight years defending, applauding and enabling Bush abuses on this front, while subsequently cheerleading the congressional Republicans as they carry forward the politics of intimidation and government overreach into the Obama era.

Let’s begin there. The congressional Republicans are outraged by the IRS story, but they haven’t been able to scramble to the floor of the House quickly enough to target left-leaning groups.

1. Planned Parenthood. After a hoax video was produced by James O’Keefe and released by a professional clown-wrangler, the late Andrew Breitbart, the Republican Party has engaged in a years-long effort to strip the organization, which offers cancer screenings and other affordable medical services for women, of critical funding from the government. The votes in the House as well as in state legislatures from Arizona to New Jersey to Texas and New Hampshire — to the tune of at least $60 million — are nothing more than assault against a political enemy.

2. ACORN. The government attack on ACORN, traditionally a left-leaning organization, might be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. As with Planned Parenthood, the Republican inquisition against ACORN was nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt based on, once again, a selectively-edited prank video by a scam artist, O’Keefe, who’s been convicted of wiretapping a sitting U.S. Senator and forced in court to pay $100,000 in restitution to a fired ACORN employee. Yet the entire Republican congressional delegation lined up behind Breitbart and O’Keefe and destroyed ACORN, which entirely shut down in 2010. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans from continuing to vote on at least several occasions to defund the nonexistent group. In fact, last week the chairman House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) introduced a section into a spending bill that reads: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors.”

3. Voter ID Laws and Voter Purges. Whether it’s Governor Rick Scott of Florida purging voter rolls of minority voters who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates or states like Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee passing restrictive Voter ID laws, the Republicans are making sure that fewer and fewer Democrats will be able to freely cast a ballot — our most sacred right as citizens in a representative democracy.

What about the Bush years?

4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007, the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats — an assertion that was backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and Bush 41.

5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the attorney firing scandal in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren’t prosecuting enough Democrats.

6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, but high profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he’s suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that’s funded by Exxon-Mobil.

7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS collected party affiliation via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter registration and party affiliation information?

8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-war Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as having “semi-communistic ideology.”

9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-war Meetings. Also in 2005, the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 “suspicious incidents” and spied on four-dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War.

10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yesterday, it was learned that a U.S. attorney, Ronald Machen, subpoenaed and confiscated phone records from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation regarding an article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a terrorist attack on the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. Well, this story pales in comparison with the Bush administration’s inquisition against the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts. The Bush FBI seized phone records — without subpoena — from four American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do we know this for sure? Former FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Adding… Bush White House Warns Bill Maher After 9/11. Congressional Republicans Condemn Moveon.org. I’ve coupled these two instances into one simply because they each underscore the Republican penchant for bullying dissenters. Shortly after 9/11, Bill Maher committed the mortal sin of suggesting that terrorists weren’t “cowards” (he was merely agreeing with conservative fire-eater Dinesh D’Souza). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House, warned Maher: “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” Maher’s show at the time, Politically Incorrect, was cancelled shortly thereafter. Years later, Moveon.org criticized conservative superhero David Petraeus with a full-page ad featuring the awkward play-on-words “General Betray Us.” George W. Bush himself pilloried Moveon and the Senate voted to condemn the ad while lionizing Petraeus (a love affair that came to an end last year).

With the IRS and AP stories, any cursory glimpse at the news will prove that Democrats — even liberal bloggers — have been critical of the Obama administration’s actions, just as they had been with the actions of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. But Republicans? No such fairness or honesty. Of course. And it’s also important to note the distinction between these recent stories and what’s obviously a Republican textbook strategy of employing any means necessary in suppressing its opposition — from the ballot box to the pages of our top-shelf newspapers. This is what they do: they intimidate, bully, prosecute and silence their critics as a matter of routine. And they rarely apologize or accept responsibility for it.

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If you want to understand what is wrong with US media culture, this story sums it up. From the Guardian:

News organisations in the US are reviewing their policies on quote approval after the New York Times blew the whistle on the draconian methods deployed by campaign officials to control their media messages.

The New York Times and the LA Times have confirmed to the Guardian that they are reviewing the practice of allowing reporters to submit quotes for approval by the Obama and Romney camps before publication.

Reuters said it opposed the “wholly unacceptable” practice, as did the Associated Press. Web publisher Buzzfeed said it tried to avoid it, and RealClearPolitics said it was discussing the issue with staff.

The pushback on quote approval followed a front-page article in Monday’s New York Times, revealing that the Obama and Romney campaigns frequently insist on reading and redacting quotes given by interviewees before permission is given to publish.

The Times article said reporters were being granted interviews with officials from the Obama campaign “under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name”. The report added that Romney advisors “almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article”.

It is astonishing that public servants wield this type of power over the press, and it’s a function of the profit at all costs culture that has seeped into the media industry. News media institutions are there, at least in theory, to serve the interests of the public by holding power to account. The press is an important part of any functioning democracy as it is supposed to shine light on corruption and illegal behavior, particularly in government. To discover that the White House only gives out interviews to institutions they can manipulate shows you just how far the US press has fallen in recent years. Everyone knows the corporate media filters out important stories in the name of profit, but this revelation takes it another step further as it is a codification of their complete acquiescence to power.

Are there any big news institutions left that actually do their jobs?

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Zimmerman's account of events now in serious doubt

From the Huff Post:

A new trove of evidence released by the Florida state attorney prosecuting George Zimmerman for second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin reveals the extent to which law enforcement doubted Zimmerman’s early claims of self-defense.

“His actions are inconsistent with those of a person who has stated he was in fear of another subject,” an investigator wrote in an early report on the Feb. 26 shooting. “Investigative findings show that George Michael Zimmerman had at least two opportunities to speak with Trayvon Benjamin Martin in order to defuse the circumstances,” and Zimmerman twice “failed to identify himself as a concerned resident or a neighborhood watch member.”

The report also said that Martin’s and Zimmerman’s respective physical dimensions did not place Zimmerman at a disadvantage worthy of lethal force.

“Investigative findings show the physical injuries displayed by [Zimmerman] are marginally consistent with a life-threatening violent episode described by him, during which neither a deadly weapon nor deadly force was deployed by Trayvon Martin,” the report said.

The evidence released this afternoon includes a one-hour video recording of an interview between lead investigator Christopher Serino and Zimmerman at the Sanford, Fla., police headquarters, a pair of audio recordings between Serino and Zimmerman, and 29 pages of police reports and notes, including a handwritten narrative by Zimmerman recounting the events on the night of Feb. 26.

Hours after the release of the new evidence, Serino, who had expressed doubts over Zimmerman’s story and suggested that charges be filed, was reassigned to the patrol division, according to the Associated Press. The reassignment came at his own request, AP reports.

This latest Zimmerman disclosures are the latest in a series of releases of formerly sealed evidence, made public under pressure from media companies, who have argued that full disclosure of the evidence is in the public’s interest. The prosecution and the defense both objected.

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John Edwards: Off the hook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From YahooNews:

The Justice Department announced Wednesday it will give up its criminal case against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

In May, a deadlocked North Carolina federal jury found Edwards not guilty of one charge of accepting illegal campaign donations. The group couldn’t reach a decision on five other felony charges, including one alleging that Edwards knowingly used $1 million in secret campaign donations from wealthy donors to support his mistress. Edwards could have faced 30 years in prison if convicted.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement that the Justice Department put forward its best case. ”The jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict on five of the six counts of the indictment, however, and we respect their judgment. In the interest of justice, we have decided not to retry Mr. Edwards on those counts.”

The prosecution was short on proof that Edwards knew about the payments or that he knew that accepting them was illegal. “As noted by nearly every campaign finance lawyer who considered the matter, this was a lousy case,” Melanie Sloan, director of the campaign finance watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics told the Associated Press after the trial. “All the salacious details prosecutors offered up to prove that Edwards is, indeed, despicable, were not enough to persuade the jury to convict him.”

A copy of the dismissal order can be found here.

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President of Spain Mariano Rajoy warns that the danger is far from over. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Responding to increasingly urgent calls from across Europe and the United States, Spainon Saturday agreed to accept a bailout for its cash-starved banks as European finance ministers offered an aid package of up to $125 billion.

European leaders hope the promise of such a large package, made in an emergency conference call with Spain, will quell rising financial turmoil ahead of elections in Greece that they fear could further shake world markets.

The decision made Spain the fourth and largest European country to agree to accept emergency assistance as part of the continuing debt crisis. The aid offered by countries that use the euro was nearly three times the $46 billion in extra capital the International Monetary Fund said was the minimum that the wobbly Spanish banking sector needed to guard against a deepening of the country’s economic crisis.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tried to deflect criticism for his government’s decision to seek assistance for Spain’s ailing bank. The winners, he said,  were “the credibility of the European project,  the future of the euro, the solidity of our financial system and the possibility that credit will flow again.”

But he warned  that Spain’s economic problems would worsen  this year despite the request. “This year is going to be a bad one,” Mr. Rajoy told reporters, according to The Associated Press.  More people, he said, could lose their jobs — one out of every four Spaniards is already unemployed.

Mr Rajoy also insisted that the rescue deal should not be seen as the fourth bailout in the euro crisis but as a loan  to recapitalize Spain’s weakest banks, “which isn’t that easy to obtain.”

The announcement of a deal came amid growing fears that instability in Spain could drag down an already sputtering world economy. The decision was the culmination of weeks of a contentious back-and-forth between Spain and its would-be creditors in which it was hard to tell how much of Spain’s resistance to financial help was tactical maneuvering for a better deal and how much a refusal to admit the depth of the banking sector’s troubles.

The escalating tension prompted President Obama to push Friday, in unusually explicit terms, for quick European action.

European officials have said they wanted their offer to go well beyond Spain’s immediate needs to shield the country from any destabilizing effect from next weekend’s Greek parliamentary election. Spain has fought to avoid the stigma of a bailout and on Saturday portrayed the Europeans’ offer as coming with few strings attached. Although the European statement on the aid package gave few details, it did not mention new austerity measures and said the conditions of the agreement were focused instead on banking reforms, as Spain had requested.

Spanish officials on Saturday denied that their country was in the same position as Greece, Portugal and Ireland, which have all received bailouts that demanded they slash spending. And on Sunday, Mr Rajoy  rejected suggestions that Spain had been pushed to request help ahead of new Greek elections on June 17 that could precipitate Greece’s withdrawal from European monetary union.

Read more at the NYTimes…

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To banks, students are a potential goldmine

By Ben Cohen: To get ahead in life, going to college has traditionally provided the surest way of creating career opportunities. An academic or skills based education opens doors to high paying work, and the better the college, usually, the better the job. What has happened in recent years in America though, is threatening to destroy that promise and saddle students with so much debt that going to college will become a burden rather than an opportunity.

The war on students and the poor is happening on two fronts – first is the ongoing Right wing crusade to privatize education in all its forms – a well known method of disenfranchising the poor, and second the insidious behavior of banking institutions that have found ways to legally take money from students under the guise of providing administrative services. In a devastating public interest report leaked to the AP, as many as 900 colleges are pushing payment cards with extortionate fees on their students who sometimes have to use them to receive their financial aid:

Colleges and banks rake in millions from the fees, often through secretive deals and sometimes in apparent violation of federal law, according to the report, an early copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

More than two out of five U.S. higher-education students — more than 9 million people — attend schools that have deals with financial companies, says the report, written by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Higher Education Fund.

“For decades, student aid was distributed without fees,” said Rich Williams, the report’s lead author. “Now bank middlemen are making out like bandits using campus cards to siphon off millions of student aid dollars.”

Programs like Higher One’s shift the cost of handing out financial aid money from universities, which no longer have to print and mail checks, to fee-paying students, Williams said.

The fees add to the mountain of debt many students already take on to get a diploma. U.S. student debt tops $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Government loans and financial aid have traditionally been distributed directly to students, but due to lack of regulation, banking institutions have latched onto a captive market of extremely vulnerable people who are either in dire need of money, or unaware of the debt they are incurring. It is the worst form of predatory lending, and the effects if left unchecked could be devastating.

Student debt is bad enough as it is – the cost of education is soaring in America, and it is not slowing down. As The New York Times reported in 2008:

According to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

It is amazing that on top of this, banks are adding to the costs with services that should be provided by the state or higher education institutes themselves.

The ramifications of this abuse of students should cause some serious concerns. It is difficult not to sound conspiratory, but a clear pattern is emerging that has seen banks attain dangerous levels of control over people’s lives. The use of debt as a control method is as old as banking itself, but the situation is now so dire that students face the prospect of an entire lifetime of debt. The alternative is equally as bad – young people will simply stop going to college to avoid owing all their future earnings to banking institutions and consign themselves to work in unfulfilling, low paying jobs. The outcome is of course the same: Education becomes a luxury for the rich, while everyone else gets poorer.

More worryingly, the system of extreme debt could collapse on itself at any moment as it did in 2008 when housing debt levels were so high that no one could pay their mortgages to the banks. Government stepped in to guarantee the loans and prop the system up again, but if student debt becomes intolerably high (and it looks like it is) the country could be faced with another situation where the banking system falls apart when the jobs market fails to produce high enough salaries for employees to pay back their loans.

It is another example of short term greed not only destroying lives, but preventing them from even starting.

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Romney vs Obama 2012 is official

Mitt Romney clinched the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday with a win in the Texas primary, a triumph of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and had to fight hard this year as voters flirted with a carousel of GOP rivals.

According to the Associated Press count, Romney surpassed the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination by winning at least 88 delegates in the Texas primary.

The former Massachusetts governor has reached the nomination milestone with a steady message of concern about the U.S. economy, a campaign organization that dwarfed those of his GOP foes and a fundraising operation second only to his Democratic opponent in the general election, President Barack Obama.

“I am honored that Americans across the country have given their support to my candidacy and I am humbled to have won enough delegates to become the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee,” Romney said in a statement.

“Our party has come together with the goal of putting the failures of the last three and a half years behind us,” Romney said. “I have no illusions about the difficulties of the task before us. But whatever challenges lie ahead, we will settle for nothing less than getting America back on the path to full employment and prosperity.”

Romney must now fire up conservatives who still doubt him while persuading swing voters that he can do a better job fixing the nation’s struggling economy than Obama. In Obama, he faces a well-funded candidate with a proven campaign team in an election that will be heavily influenced by the economy.

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JPMorgan Chase is expected to accept the resignation of one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street after the bank lost $2 billion in a trading blunder, a person familiar with the matter said Sunday.

The bank will accept the resignation of Ina Drew, its chief investment officer, the person told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the decision publicly.

Drew, 55, one of the highest-paid officials at JPMorgan Chase, had offered to resign several times since CEO Jamie Dimon disclosed the trading loss on Thursday, the person said. Pressure built on the bank over the weekend to accept.

At least two other executives at the bank will be held accountable for the mistake, the person said.

The casualties come as JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, seeks to minimize the damage caused by the $2 billion loss. Investors shaved almost 10 percent off JPMorgan’s stock price on Friday.

Dimon has said the mistake will complicate the efforts of banks to fight certain regulatory changes three years after the financial crisis.

JPMorgan’s disclosure has led lawmakers and critics of the banking industry to call for stricter regulation of Wall Street. Many post-crisis rules governing risk-taking by banks are still being written.

Drew oversaw the division of the bank responsible for the loss. She was paid $15.5 million last year and almost $16 million in 2010, making her one of the highest-paid officials at JPMorgan, according to a regulatory filing.

Drew declined comment through a bank spokeswoman. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan Chase, also declined comment. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Sunday that Drew and two other executives were expected to resign soon.

Read more at Business Week….

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