UPDATE: JUDGE “EXTREMELY DISTURBED” BY DEVOS’ ILLEGAL COURT VIOLATION “16,000 TIMES” | PRESS RELEASE

BETSY DEVOS HAS INVESTMENTS IN PREDATORY STUDENT LOAN COMPANIES

We The People

“The judge is taking this flagrant violation of borrowers’ rights extremely seriously, said Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill. “Secretary DeVos has repeatedly and brazenly violated the court’s order by collecting for-profit college student debts and denying their rights. Thousands of former Corinthian students had their tax refunds seized and wages garnished despite a court order not to collect anything from them. This behavior is illegal and should not be tolerated by the court. We agree with Judge Kim that there must be consequences for these astounding violations and we look forward to the judge’s ruling.”

Today’s hearing was a case management conference where the judge addressed a September 18 filing by Secretary DeVos that revealed she had continued to collect on the debt of thousands of former for-profit college students — a direct violation of the court’s injunction ordering the Department not to collect on those debts. According to the Department’s filing:

The Department demanded incorrect loan payment from 16,034 students
Of those students, 3,289 student borrowers made one or more loan payments because of these demands, which they were not actually supposed to pay
The Department has still not confirmed that 1,147 students’ loans are in the correct status, leaving those students in limbo
The Department has harmed the credit of 847 non-defaulted students
The Department subjected 1,808 students to involuntary debt collections (garnished their wages or taken their tax refunds or benefits)

https://predatorystudentlending.org/…/update-judge-extreme…/

PREDATORYSTUDENTLENDING.ORG

UPDATE: Judge “extremely disturbed” by DeVos’ illegal court violation

A judge today said she was “extremely disturbed” that Betsy DeVos violated a court and will decide whether she will be held in contempt and face sanctions.

Judge lifts stay on case and directs expeditious case schedule; communicates extreme displeasure at government’s violation of student borrowers’ rights

BOSTON – At today’s hearing, Judge Sallie Kim lifted the stay in the class action lawsuit on behalf Corinthian College borrowers and promised to rule on whether the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos will be held in contempt and face sanctions.

Students represented by the Project on Predatory Student Lending and Housing and Economic Rights Advocates (HERA) are seeking sanctions and to hold the Department in contempt after the Department admitted it had illegally continued to collect the loans of thousands of former for-profit college students in direct violation of a court order to stop collections on all members of the class of Corinthian borrowers. Judge Kim said that “there have to be consequences for violation of my order sixteen thousand times.”

“The judge is taking this flagrant violation of borrowers’ rights extremely seriously, said Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill. “Secretary DeVos has repeatedly and brazenly violated the court’s order by collecting for-profit college student debts and denying their rights. Thousands of former Corinthian students had their tax refunds seized and wages garnished despite a court order not to collect anything from them. This behavior is illegal and should not be tolerated by the court. We agree with Judge Kim that there must be consequences for these astounding violations and we look forward to the judge’s ruling.”

Today’s hearing was a case management conference where the judge addressed a September 18 filing by Secretary DeVos that revealed she had continued to collect on the debt of thousands of former for-profit college students — a direct violation of the court’s injunction ordering the Department not to collect on those debts. According to the Department’s filing:

• The Department demanded incorrect loan payment from 16,034 students
• Of those students, 3,289 student borrowers made one or more loan payments because of these demands, which they were not actually supposed to pay
• The Department has still not confirmed that 1,147 students’ loans are in the correct status, leaving those students in limbo
• The Department has harmed the credit of 847 non-defaulted students
• The Department subjected 1,808 students to involuntary debt collections (garnished their wages or taken their tax refunds or benefits)

The Project on Predatory Student Lending responded in a case management statement filed in advance of the hearing, calling out Secretary DeVos and the Department for their violation of a court order and the illegal collection on fraudulent student loans from Corinthian Colleges. The Project alerted the judge that DeVos and the Department are in contempt of the Court’s prior injunction ruling and requested the opportunity to be heard on the appropriate sanctions.

The Project argued that the Department should have to turn over the name and contact information of affected students—which Judge Kim said she would order it to do. The Project also argued that the debts of students who faced these unlawful collection actions should be discharged. This and other possible sanctions will be explored in further briefing from the Department (due Oct. 15) and students (due Oct. 21). The judge also lifted the stay that has prevented the case from moving forward while the Department appealed the preliminary injunction that it has now admitted to violating. She said the case will move forward “full steam ahead,” and asked the parties to file a timeline for resolving the case by October 21.

Case Background: Calvillo Manriquez v. DeVos

Under the Department of Education’s watch, Corinthian took in billions of dollars in taxpayer money and used boiler-room-style high-pressure tactics and racially-targeted advertising to build its business, all while producing outcomes for students so terrible that it had to lie to stay in business. Corinthian filed for bankruptcy and avoided its debts, but the students it cheated were left thousands of dollars in debt for an education they never received.

Between 2015 and 2016, the Department informed certain former students that they were eligible for a full loan discharge on account of Corinthian’s misconduct. However, in March 2018, the Department notified these students that because their average earnings were not less than half of the average earnings of some unspecified group of students who went to a different, non-Corinthian school, they actually had to repay a majority their loans. In coming up with this murky and convoluted calculation, the Department secretly and illegally gathered information about borrowers’ earnings from the Social Security Administration. Perversely, the Department obtained the data from SSA pursuant to an information sharing agreement entered into for the purpose of protecting the public from predatory institutions like Corinthian by publishing “gainful employment” metrics.

In May 2018 and again in June 2018, a federal judge rebuked the Department of Education for its wrongful and illegal continued attempts to collect on the debt of students who were defrauded by the for profit Corinthian Colleges, ruling that the Department must stop collecting on the loans of tens of thousands of Corinthian students in light of the Department’s use of this illegal rule to reduce relief to borrowers by 80 percent. The preliminary injunction and subsequent order required the Department of Education to stop applying its illegal “average earnings rule” to cheated former students of Corinthian Colleges, and prevented the Department from further collecting on the plaintiffs’ loans despite the Department’s ongoing and illegal attempts to take money from borrowers, often times through coercive means such seizing earned income tax credits and through wage garnishment.  For more information about the case and the preliminary injunction, click here.

In September 2019, U.S. Department of Education and DeVos admitted in a court filing that it is violating this federal court order by continuing to illegally collect on the student loan debt of thousands of former Corinthian students. Since the injunction was issued, the Department has demanded payment from 16,000 borrowers. Of those who were subject to illegal payment demands by the Department of Education, over 3,000 made unnecessary payments on their loans. The Department also involuntarily took 1,808 borrowers’ much-needed tax refunds and wages. Many others suffered from inaccurate negative credit reporting. The Department’s violations are the exact behavior the preliminary injunction was intended to prevent.

About the Project on Predatory Student Lending

Established in 2012, the Project on Predatory Student Lending represents former students of predatory for-profit colleges. Its mission is to litigate to make it legally and financially impossible for federally-funded predatory schools to cheat students.

The Project has brought a wide variety of cases on behalf of former students of for-profit colleges. It has sued the federal Department of Education for its failures to meet its legal obligation to police this industry and stop the perpetration and collection of fraudulent student loan debt.

LINK

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), nearly 2 million diabetics, many of them poor, got health insurance, a new study shows (n=2,400). Increasing coverage rates can enhance health equity, because people with undiagnosed or untreated diabetes disproportionately belong to underserved groups.

LINK

The Age of the Demagogues

The Age of the Demagogues: Chris Hedges

The collapse of our political and cultural institutions has turned charlatans and thugs such as presidential hopeful Donald Trump into viable…

TRUTHDIG.COM

Frightening stuff, but spot on. "The disgust directed at an ineffectual liberalism—as was true in late imperial Russia and the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia—has given rise to a rejection of liberalism. Liberals and secularists, along with groups such as feminists, African-Americans and homosexuals that were supposedly championed in the quest for cultural diversity, are viewed not as political competitors but as contaminants. This is giving rise to a homegrown fascism—a subject I examined in “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”—buttressed by the gun culture, a resurgence of racism and sexism and the fusion of the symbols of the Christian cross and the American flag. This American fascism will expand unless there is a radical restructuring to reintegrate dispossessed Americans into the economy. The failure to reverse the corporate assault, the continued expansion of poverty and despair, will accelerate the country’s breakdown. It will ensure the emergence of demagogues who, channeling this rage, will stoke white vigilante violence and call for the state repression of all groups including Black Lives Matter, abortion providers, environmentalists and anti-capitalists that are blamed for the country’s decline."

  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest on July 11 in Las Vegas. (John Locher / AP)

The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Friday’s lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of poor people of color by police, and the rise of thuggish demagogues such as Donald Trump are symptoms of the collapse of our political and cultural institutions.

These institutions, which once made possible piecemeal and incremental reform, which sought to protect the weak from the tyranny of the majority and give them a voice, acted as a safety valve to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and address the grievances of the underclass. They did not defy the system of capitalism. They colluded with the structures of privilege and white supremacy. But they provided some restraints on the worst abuse and exploitation. The capturing of major institutions by corporate power and the moral bankruptcy of our elites, especially members of our self-identified liberal class, have shattered this equilibrium.

A faux liberal class, epitomized by amoral politicians such as the Clintons and Barack Obama, has led many disenfranchised people, especially the white underclass, to direct a legitimate rage toward liberals and the supposed liberal values they represent. Racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, homophobia, sexism and vigilante violence, condemned by liberal, college-educated elites, are embraced by those who have been betrayed, those who now speak back to liberal elites in words, gestures and acts, sometimes violent, designed to denigrate the core values of a liberal democracy. The hatred is the product of a liberal class that did nothing to halt corporations from driving tens of millions of families into poverty and desperation as it mouthed empty platitudes about rights and economic advancement.

The Republican business elites, which declared war on the liberal class’ call for cultural diversity, allied themselves with an array of protofascists in the Christian right, the tea party, groups such as the National Rifle Association and The Heritage Foundation, the neo-Confederate movement, the right-to-life movement and right-wing militias. The elites in the Republican Party, who needed an ideological veneer to mask their complicity in the corporate assault, saw these protofascists as useful idiots. They thought, naively, that by demonizing liberals, feminists, African-Americans, Muslims, abortion providers, undocumented workers, intellectuals and homosexuals they could redirect the growing rage of the masses, sending it against the vulnerable, as well as against the only institution that could curb corporate power, the government, while they greedily disemboweled the nation.

But what the Republican elites have done, as they now realize to their horror, is empower a huge swath of the public—largely white—that is gripped by magical thinking and fetishizes violence. It was only a matter of time before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave of alienation and rage. If Trump fails in his bid to become the GOP presidential nominee, another demagogue will emerge to take his place. Trump is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.

The corporate state was never threatened by the liberal class’ myopic preoccupation with cultural diversity or the right wing’s championing of supposedly “Christian” values. This was anti-politics masquerading as politics. The culture wars did not challenge imperialism, neoliberalism and globalization. The dictates of the market, the primacy of corporate profit and the military-industrial complex remained sacrosanct. The mounting distress of the underclass was ignored or manipulated during the culture wars. Liberals who embraced cultural diversity did so within a neoliberal framework. Feminism, for example, became about placing individual women in positions of power—this is Hillary Clinton’s mantra—not about empowering poor, marginalized and oppressed women. Post-racial America became about a black president who, asCornel Westsays, serves as “a black mascot for Wall Street.”

The preoccupation with cultural diversity, as Russell Jacoby writes in “The End of Utopia,” was nothing more than a call to include a broader spectrum of people within neoliberal elites. It was, as he says, about “patronage, not revolution.”

“The radical multiculturalists, postcolonialists and other cutting edge theorists gush about marginality with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, goal of joining the mainstream,” he writes. “They specialize in marginalization to up their market value. Again, this is understandable; the poor and the excluded want to be wealthy and included, but why is this multicultural or subversive?”

Jacoby argues that cultural diversity among the liberal class represents “power devoid of a vision or program.” He goes on to say that the call by multiculturalists for inclusion within the power structure does nothing to challenge the deadly “monoculturalism” of corporatism.

Jacoby’s point is important. The liberal class failed for decades to decry neoliberalism’s assault on the poor and on workingmen and -women. It busied itself with a boutique activism. It is not that cultural diversity is bad. It isn’t. It is that cultural diversity when divorced from economic and political justice, from the empowerment of the oppressed, is elitist. And this is why these liberal values are being rejected by a disenfranchised white underclass. They are seen as serving the elites, and marginalized groups, at the expense of that underclass.

The academy, the press, the entertainment industry, the arts and religious institutions have been purged of those who do not sing to the tune of neoliberalism and bow before the glories of corporate capitalism. The destruction of the liberal class, something I explore in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,”has created a closed political system crippled by polarization, political gridlock, crushing austerity, unchecked pillage by financial elites and a carnival of meaningless political theater. It has shut out genuine voices of dissent. The failure by liberals to confront or even name what Sheldon Wolincalled our system of “inverted totalitarianism” made them complicit in the destruction of our capitalist democracy.

The gains made by minorities and the oppressed within the society, whether on college campuses or in the workplace, are being rolled back. The culture wars, used by the political and economic elites to divert attention from the ascendancy of corporate power, have escaped from the hands of their manipulators. A destitute working class knows the feel-your-pain language of the liberal class and the Democratic Party is a lie. And it knows the “compassionate conservatism” epitomized by the Bush dynasty and the Republican establishment is a lie.

Republicans, like Democrats, did not prevent wages from declining, unemployment and chronic underemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. treasury, or jobs from being exported. The two major parties colluded to pass trade agreements, ranging from NAFTA and the WTO to the now-pending TPP, that impoverish workers and weaken the power of government to intervene to protect the citizenry and the environment. They worked together to strip citizens of constitutional rights and install the most pervasive security and surveillance state in human history. They collaborated with Wall Street to trash the global economy and seize trillions in taxpayer money in bailouts. The two parties funded disastrous and futile imperial wars that enrich the arms manufacturers and defense contractors while bankrupting the nation. They militarized police, rewrote the laws to explode our prison population and destroyed social service programs such as our welfare system, which was dismantled by the Clinton administration.

The two parties orchestrated the corporate coup d’état while diverting citizens with the battles over gay rights, abortion, “Christian” values, gun laws and affirmative action. 

The country realizes it has been sold out. Most citizens are apathetic and do not vote consistently. Some, especially in the white underclass, are willing to follow anyone, no matter how buffoonish, who promises that the parasites and courtiers will be driven from power. 

This mixture of rage and apathy is a recipe for totalitarianism.

The hypermasculine values of the military are embraced across the political spectrum as an antidote to paralysis and decay. Toughness and violence are venerated. The obsequious hero worship, the celebration of American power, the sanctification of the military and military values, inflect all political discourse. Hero worship of the military has unwittingly laid the ideological groundwork for demagogues who promise glory, strength, order and discipline. It justifies the emergence of an authoritarian police state.

Half of all Americans live in poverty. They have watched helplessly as their communities have been plunged into distress by the flight of manufacturing jobs and as their infrastructure, both moral and physical, has been ripped out from under them. America resembles the developing world. A tiny, oligarchic elite amasses obscene amounts of wealth while most of the population lives amid boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pothole-riddled streets, abandoned factories and warehouses and crumbling schools. They see no future. They have abandoned hope. Their despair now infects a shrinking and desperate middle class. Americans feel isolated, vulnerable and frightened. They yearn for moral and economic renewal, revived greatness, and vengeance. And many are desperately hunting for a savior outside the established political order.

The disgust directed at an ineffectual liberalism—as was true in late imperial Russia and the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia—has given rise to a rejection of liberalism. Liberals and secularists, along with groups such as feminists, African-Americans and homosexuals that were supposedly championed in the quest for cultural diversity, are viewed not as political competitors but as contaminants. This is giving rise to a homegrown fascism—a subject I examined in “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”—buttressed by the gun culture, a resurgence of racism and sexism and the fusion of the symbols of the Christian cross and the American flag. This American fascism will expand unless there is a radical restructuring to reintegrate dispossessed Americans into the economy. The failure to reverse the corporate assault, the continued expansion of poverty and despair, will accelerate the country’s breakdown. It will ensure the emergence of demagogues who, channeling this rage, will stoke white vigilante violence and call for the state repression of all groups including Black Lives Matter, abortion providers, environmentalists and anti-capitalists that are blamed for the country’s decline. 

The perfidious game of the Democrats and the Republicans has backfired. Playing the Democrats’ mantra of cultural diversity against the Republicans’ mantra of cultural diversity weakening the fabric of American society no longer works as a mechanism of control. We have entered a new and dangerous phase in American political life. The ruling political elites have been exposed as charlatans. The rage of the underclass, especially the white underclass, has broken its bonds. The age of the demagogues has arrived.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_age_of_the_demagogues_20151129

This & That!

Christians for a Change shared Blueprint Campaign Consulting's photo.

Originally from our friends at The Christian Left. You may not agree with everything Maher says, but he often hits issues right on the head.

MoveOn.org's photo.

It took eons for nature to purify water

In the minds of the teatards (yes I said that) the man on the left is a christian and the guy on the right is not

Carl Younger shared The Blue Street Journal's photo.

Absolutely nailed it. Via The Blue Street Journal

 

 

 

Bold Nebraska

One of the effects of the oil and gas boom on the Bakken region: overflowing jails. ‪#‎NoKXL‬

Jail cells full to overflowing in Bakken oil country

trib.com

GLENDIVE, Mont. — Sheriff Craig Anderson scans the inmate roster for the Dawson County Detention Center in Glendive and sees real problems. There’s an inmate charged with murder and another

 

 

 

 

Bold Nebraska

Ford is demonstrating a concept car at the Consumer Electronics Show this week that features a solar concentrator lens on the roof.

A day's worth of sunlight can provide the vehicle with the same level of performance as the company's existing plug-in hybrid vehicle, or 108 MPGe city / 92 MPGe highway.

Are Ford and SunPower About to Make the Grid Irrelevant for EV Charging?

greentechmedia.com

Ford's new concept plug-in hybrid model, called the C-MAX Solar Energi, will host an array of SunPower's X21 high-efficiency solar cells on the top. The cells on their own wouldn't provide enough electricity to re-charge the car's

 

 

 

 

Daily Kos

A beautiful quote from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Thanks to the The Blue Street Journal for the meme.

 

 

 

 

Bill Brissette shared Herbs, Health and Happiness's photo.

Great news, I have found my car keys, now if I can just figure out where I parked the car!

 

Scientists Find Sniffing Rosemary Can Increase Memory By 75%:http://www.herbs-info.com/blog/scientists-find-sniffing-rosemary-can-increase-memory-by-75/...Please share this fantastic news from the world of science - and read our special report on scientific validation of the ancient traditions of using Rosemary as a memory enhancer! ‪#‎rosemary‬ ‪#‎herbs‬ ‪#‎memory‬ ‪#‎recall‬ ‪#‎health‬ ‪#‎science

 

 

 

Would you agree? Via The Reprimand Project

 

 

 

 

This & That.....

Dear Friend,

If you think the content of this news letter is critical for the dignified living and survival of humanity and other species on earth, please forward it to your friends and spread the word. It's time for humanity to come together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/subscribe.htm. You can also follow us on twitter, http://twitter.com/countercurrents and on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/countercurrents

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Binu Mathew
Editor
www.countercurrents.org 


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http://www.countercurrents.org/nitesh051113.htm

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