Diploma mills recruit at halfway houses and homeless shelters

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that for-profit schools are recruiting students at homeless shelters and halfway houses, enticing them into huge debts to pay for overpriced programs and sticking taxpayers with the bill.

The article also notes that Goldman Sachs, the high profile investment firm and bailout recipient whose CEO recently testified before Congress about alleged improprieties, owns (38%) the Education Management Corporation, the owner of the Art Institute of Milwaukee which is seeking a public subsidy (new market tax credits) to anchor a redevelopment project in Milwaukee's 3rd ward.

Have these billionaires no shame?


The expose is linked.

Ryan's budget busting Roadmap privatizes social security

For weeks, Congressman Paul Ryan has been praised for being innovative, responsible and even courageous for his analysis of the nation's fiscal problems.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has a more critical view writing that the Ryan's Roadmap wouldn't balance the budget, but would provide a windfall to the wealthiest Americans while privatizing Social Security. We've seen these kind of Robin Hood of the Rich policies before and they are hardly courageous. They might not help main street, but they are sure to please Goldman Sachs.

Krugman writes:

Naturally, Ryan’s response to these revelations has been a hissy fit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which has always, in my experience, been impeccably honest and careful in its work — does the point by point rebuttal.

But I’d like to follow up on small but revealing point: Ryan’s claim that diverting a substantial share of payroll taxes receipts into individual accounts does not constitute partial privatization of Social Security You see, there’s a history here.

Back when the Cato Institute first began pushing for individual Social Security accounts, it called its push, well, The Project on Social Security Privatization. As the Bush administration got ready to make its privatization push, however, it became clear that “privatization” polled badly. So the project was renamed The Project on Social Security Choice. And Republicans began bristling at any suggestions that they were proposing privatization, calling that a slander. Really.

Wait, it gets better. Cato engaged in Orwellian tactics — deleting the term “privatization” from older web posts and even from records of old conferences. But they were sloppy; there were traces of the true history throughout. I don’t know if they’re still continuing the practice.

In any case, Ryan’s attempt to deny that what his own movement used to call privatization is, in fact, privatization should settle the question of his sincerity.

Bankers pocket billions while unemployment soars

Maureen Dowd writes:

Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.

Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.


As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.


The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.


The entire column is linked.

Where is US headed?

In a provocative column in the New Republic Simon Johnson writes:

The U.S. increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets”--new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: Who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?

His answer might not surprise you. But it will disturb you if you care about the future of this country and its people.

The article is linked.

China enacts large stimulus-U.S. needs one!

Sixty-seven thousand (67,000) Chinese factories have closed and tens of thousands of workers have been laid off since the beginning of the year. As a result, the Chinese government announced a $568 billion stimulus program, 7% of GDP, aimed at bolstering its faltering economy.

The United States has lost 1.3 million private sector jobs since January while the ranks of the long-term unemployed have grown at record rates.

Goldman Sachs economists are predicting that the unemployment rate (now 6.5%) will rise to 8.5% by the end of next year and go even higher in early 2010 because "U.S. domestic demand and production are dropping sharply." The cumulative trough-to-peak projected increase of more than 4 percentage points in the jobless rate would be the most since World War II.

Like China, the United States needs a bold stimulus program.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, is urging U.S. policy makers to think big, suggesting a back-of-the- envelop number of $600 billion. That's a significantly smaller percentage of the U.S. economy than the Chinese plan, but much bigger than the $300 to $400 billion plans currently being discussed in Washington.

Krugman notes that if the stimulus package is larger than needed and the economy overheats, the Fed can easily raise interest rates to head off the threat of inflation. But if the stimulus is too small, there is nothing the Fed can do since interest rates are already at historic lows.

The Bush administration and Congress moved quickly when Wall Street and its highly paid CEOs were teetering on the edge of financial collapse. Now that the middle class is facing a similar catastrophe they are dithering while America is burning.

Krugman's column is linked here.