A Trillion Here, A Trillion There

May 10, 2010

by Al Doyle

As MIA has long insisted, there is no point short of total economic meltdown to prevent the elite from bailing out politically connected financiers and socialistic nations that spend far beyond their means.  What started out days ago as a $145 billion bailout for bankrupt Greece is morphing into a $1 trillion scheme that would also benefit Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain - or at least bail out the fools that lent money to these nations.

Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan - never known as a hardline fiscal conservative himself - from a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal: "Los Angeles is facing a terminal financial crisis.  Between now and 2014, the city will likely declare bankruptcy, yet mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council have been either unable or unwilling to face this fact.

  "According to the city's own forecasts, in the next four years annual pension and post-retirement health care costs will increase by about $2.5 billion if no action is taken by the city government… When Mr. Villaraigosa took office, there were 4.73 million jobs in Los Angeles and 252,000 unemployed.  Today there are just 4.19 million jobs in Los Angeles and over 632,000 unemployed people."

As the number of government dollars involved continues to rise, higher education is becoming a field full of scams and cons.  Daniel Golden of Bloomberg News told of how the University of Phoenix and other schools are attempted to sign up the homeless and convince them to go heavily into debt to attend schools that may be of no help at all to their employment prospects.

"Benson Rollins wants a college degree.  The unemployed high school dropout who attends Alcoholics Anonymous and has been homeless for 10 months is being courted by the University of Phoenix.  Two of its recruiters got themselves invited to a Cleveland shelter last October and pitched the advantages of going to the country's largest for-profit to 70 destitute men.

"That visit spurred 23-year old Rollins to fill out an online form expressing interested to Cleveland salespeople, who then barraged him with phone calls and e-mails, urging a tour of its Cleveland campus.  . .Rollins' experience is increasingly common.  The boom in for-profit education driven by the consensus that Americans need more than a high school diploma has intensified efforts to recruit the homeless. 

"Such disadvantaged students are desirable because they qualify for federal grants and loans, which are largely responsible for the prosperity of for-profit colleges.   Federal aid for students at for-profit colleges jumped from $4.6 billion in 2004 to $26.5 billion in 2009.  Publicly traded higher education companies derive three-fourths of their profits from federal funds, with Phoenix at 86 percent, up from just 48 percent in 2001 and approaching the 90 percent limit set by federal law.

"The privately held Drake College of Business, which trains people to be medical and dental technicians, relied on taxpayers for 87 percent of its revenue in 2007.  Almost 5 percent of the student body at its Newark, N.J. campus is homeless."  Students who attend Chancellor University in Cleveland will pay $9750 a year as compared to $2400 for similar classes at Cuyahoga Community College, and Cuyahoga sometimes provides grants and tuition reductions for low-income students.

If a person can't afford a place to live, how can they be expected to afford tuition at a private college?  This kind of cynical game is also played at traditional colleges, as poor students who may be ill equipped to go to school are urged to take out large loans.  Unlike other debts, college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy.

"If the homeless have a bad student loan, they can't find a place to live, they can't go back to school, and in this economy, there's not a lot of work," said Archetta Jones, case manager at the Tacoma Rescue Mission.  "That leaves a person with no options."