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How Banks Skim Millions From Student Aid Using Debit-Card-Linked Student IDs
WASHINGTON – Over 9 million students are at risk for increased educational debt, due to bank-affiliated campus debit cards that come with high fees, insufficient consumer protections, and few options. Financial institutions now have affinity partnerships with almost 900 campuses nationwide, grafting bank products onto student IDs and other campus cards to become the primary recipient of billions in federal financial aid to distribute to students.
“Campus debit cards are wolves in sheep’s clothing,” observed Rich Williams, U.S. PIRG Higher Education Advocate and report co-author. “Students think they can access their dollars freely, but instead their aid is being eaten up in fees.”
The Campus Debit Card Trap, a new report released by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, finds that banks and financial firms now control or influence federal financial aid disbursement to over 9 million students by linking checking accounts and prepaid debit cards to student IDs. For decades, students would receive their aid by check, without being charged any fees to access their student aid. Now, students end up paying big fees on their student aid, including per-swipe fees of $0.50, inactivity fees of $10 or more after 6 months, overdraft fees of up to $38 and plenty more. Financial institutions aggressively market or default students into their bank accounts to maximize these fees.
A well-structured debit card program can provide benefits to students, but many current programs provide little to no choice, while high fees on grant and loan money leave students in deeper debt.
“Every penny of financial aid money should go to educational expenses, not an education in high bank fees,” said Williams.
Read MORE.
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US commandos parachuted into N. Korea: report
US and South Korean special forces have been parachuting into North Korea to gather intelligence about underground military installations, a US officer has said in comments carried in US media.
Army Brigadier General Neil Tolley, commander of US special forces in South Korea, told a conference held in Florida last week that Pyongyang had built thousands of tunnels since the Korean war, The Diplomat reported.
“The entire tunnel infrastructure is hidden from our satellites,” Tolley said, according to The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine. “So we send (South Korean) soldiers and US soldiers to the North to do special reconnaissance.”
“After 50 years, we still don’t know much about the capability and full extent” of the underground facilities,” he said, in comments reported by the National Defense Industrial Association’s magazine on its website.
Tolley said the commandos were sent in with minimal equipment to facilitate their movements and minimize the risk of detection by North Korean forces.
At least four of the tunnels built by Pyongyang go under the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea, Tolley said.
“We don’t know how many we don’t know about,” he admitted.
Among the facilities identified are 20 air fields that are partially underground, and thousands of artillery positions.
Read more HERE.
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Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
[AN INVESTIGATION INTO CYBER WARFARE CARRIED OUT AGAINST IRAN BY THE US AND ISRAEL]
WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.
More HERE.
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U.S. Army Pfc. Chris Kunze, right, relaxes with his military working dog in Khoni Ghar in Afghanistan’s Khost province, May 27, 2012. Kunze, a cannon crewmember, is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 377th Parachute Field Artillery Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Kimberly Trumbull
via.
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After more than a year in space, the U.S. Air Force’s secretive robotic space plane, the X-37B, is coming down soon.
That’s the word Wed., May 30, from officials at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the site where the reusable miniature space shuttle will land in the next few weeks, technical and weather conditions permitting.
While the exact landing date and time of the unmanned X-37B space plane is not yet determined, according to a Vandenberg Air Force Base statement, the craft’s touchdown “is expected to occur during the early- to mid-June timeframe.”
MORE.
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The Friday numbers on unemployment are grim. They are so bad lefties are having a tough time spinning it. So things are getting tense. Now threats are being made over the few opportunities available out there.
This is Obamamerica.
An influential alderman warned Metra’s executive director on Thursday that “people are going to get hurt” if the commuter rail agency fails to bolster minority participation on a $133 million South Side railroad bridge known as the “Englewood Flyover.”
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), chairman of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, did not explain who he believed would “get hurt” or who the perpetrators might be. But, he was clearly referring to civil disobedience or maybe even violence at the construction site.
“I’m trying to help you help yourself. When I say that, problems could arise. When you look at a community like Englewood [that] is challenged and you have over $1 billion of work coming through and there’s no people of color working on that project, I’m afraid people are going to get hurt,” Beale told Clifford during Thursday’s committee hearing.
“When you look at the make-up of the community — when you look at the unemployment rate … in that particular community, it’s probably 35, almost 40 percent. … To have a contract come like this in the African-American community with less than one percent minority participation is an insult.”
(odd that if you are not white, you can make all the threats you want, and not a word from the liberal media or the DOJ)
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SEE THE REST HERE
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They’re cutting military pensions and health benefits but the Pentagon found $750,000 for a new soccer field at Guantanamo for the terrorist detainees.
Fox News:
At a time of record deficits, a new soccer field for detainees at Camp 6 in Guantanamo Bay is just getting the finishing touches — at a cost of $750,000 to taxpayers.
The project was the highlight of a tour Tuesday of the detention camp for reporters at the facility covering the arraignment in a military court of Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident and the the only legal U.S. resident on trial at Guantanamo.
The project began in April 2011 and is due to finish this spring. The detainees will now have three recreation facilities at Camp 6, which is home to “highly compliant” detainees who live in a communal setting.
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ThePeoplesCube.com
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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Can you believe this? That Eric Holder, who is sworn to uphold the laws of the land, is breaking one?
The Justice Department ordered Florida’s elections division to halt a systematic effort to find and purge the state’s voter rolls of noncitizen voters.
Florida’s effort appears to violate both the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act — which governs voter purges — T. Christian Herren Jr., the Justice Department’s lead civil rights lawyer, wrote in a detailed two-page letter sent late Thursday night.
State officials said they were reviewing the letter. But they indicated they might fight DOJ over its interpretation of federal law and expressed frustration that President Barack Obama’s administration has stonewalled the state’s noncitizen voter hunt for nine months.
“We are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot,” said Chris Cate, spokesman for Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who was ordered by Gov. Rick Scott to conduct the search for potentially ineligible voters.
DOJ’s written demand came hours after the agency refused to comment on the matter to The Miami Herald. It also followed a federal court ruling Thursday that struck down a Republican voter-registration law that a judge found too onerous.
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Our president, who believes that he must continue doing what obviously is not working!
A recovery that looked strong at the start of the year sputtered last month, with the economy adding a mere 69,000 jobs in May — well below expectations of 150,000 new jobs — and the unemployment rate ticking up slightly to 8.2 percent, the Labor Department reported. The May numbers capped a stunning reversal from monthly reports of more than 200,000 new jobs as the headwinds of Europe and a broader global slowdown have struck the U.S. economy. [...]
Alan B. Krueger, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, said in a statement that the nation’s economic woes “were long in the making and will not be solved overnight.”
“We are still fighting back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Krueger said, putting the best spin on the numbers by adding, “Today we learned that the economy has added private sector jobs for 27 straight months, for a total of 4.3 million payroll jobs over that period. The economy is growing but it is not growing fast enough.”
“There is much more work that remains to be done to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and deep recession that began at the end of 2007. Just like last year at this time, our economy is facing serious headwinds, including the crisis in Europe and a spike in gas prices that hit American families’ finances over the past months. It is critical that we continue the President’s economic policies that are helping us dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession.”
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Wow! One of the biggest backers of the occupy movement now wants to disown it? Now waiting word from princess pelosi.
The Failure of Occupy Wall Street — Huffington Post
For those who are objective and unemotional it was easy to see this coming. The Occupy “movement” (and I use that term generously) has spiraled into irrelevance and relative obscurity. And it’s a shame, as much of its message had broad resonance which could’ve been harnessed into significant power and influence in Washington. Instead, it became a whole lotta nuthin’ over nuthin.’
So what went wrong?:
1. The “Occupy” Factor: Successful protest movements aren’t about occupation, per se. This movement was too tied to its home base, a small symbolic tent-city near Wall Street, and in other similar parks in Boston, San Francisco and other cities. In order to rally scalable national support people needed to see marchers taking to the streets rather than largely hanging out in a park, which served, rightly or wrongly, to portray the Zuccotti Park inhabitants as drifters, vagrants and freeloaders rather than committed protesters. Much of the attention was not over its message but over the communal aspect of park life. Successful protest movements aren’t about camping out, book sharing, eating, and “talking to each other,” as one organizer told me. As a friend of mine joked, Zuccotti looked more like Bonnaroo. It confined and defined the message in a way that was limited and negative.
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And we send this dumbass clinton to other countries? How about we send her to North Korea and tell them to keep her fat ass?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, boasting about government partnerships with green energy companies, declared that President Obama and his team have got economic growth “figured out.”
“So we’ve got the growth part of it figured out — if we can get the green part of it actually figured out as well,” Clinton said yesterday in an address before Denmark’s Parliament. The audience laughed, even though they didn’t know yet that the unemployment rate would rise in today’s report to 8.2 percent.
“So we have every confidence that this industry will thrive well into the future, and we certainly cannot afford to overlook its potential, not if we’re serious about creating jobs and achieving sustainable economic growth,” Clinton had said of the green energy industry moments earlier.
Clinton also touted Obama’s cap-and-trade style crackdown on coal plants, despite the lack of congressional approval.
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I would laugh like hell if her daughters decided to go lesbian!
First lady Michelle Obama, adding her support to her husband’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, said this week she supports marriage equality because she believes in the “basic values” of fairness and equality she taught her daughters.
“In a country where we teach our children that everyone is equal under the law, discriminating against same-sex couples just isn’t right,” she said in a video posted by the White House on Thursday night. “It’s as simple as that.”
The video featured Michelle Obama answering four questions asked through Twitter.
In the video, Obama doubled as a campaign surrogate for her husband. She answered the question about marriage equality accompanied by pictures of toddlers and what appear to be their same-sex parents. President Obama earlier this month said he personally supports legalizing same-sex marriage and the campaign quickly unveiled merchandise and groups devoted to LGBT rights activists who support Obama, making it a strong theme in his re-election campaign.
Like the president, the first lady referred to her two daughters in her endorsement of gay marriage. “For Barack and me it really comes down to the values of fairness and equality that we want to pass down to our girls,” she said. “I mean, these are basic values that kids learn at a very young age and that we encourage them to apply in all areas of their lives.”
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Another crazy ass bitch!
The Oklahoma Republican Party released the following statement in response to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s planned trip to Oklahoma. Wasserman Schultz will visit Tulsa on Saturday to raise money for the Barack Obama Victory Fund 2012.
“Wasserman Schultz’s visit couldn’t have come at a better time as I could use her help with something,” said Chairman Matt Pinnell. “Given the Chairwoman’s oft-repeated desire for ‘civility’ in politics, I hope she will use her visit to repudiate her own Oklahoma Democratic Party Chairman’s recent comparison of conservatives to Timothy McVeigh.”
Since being appointed to head the DNC by President Obama, Wasserman Schultz has made civility in politics one of her foremost issues. Wasserman Schultz was quoted this past January saying: “We need to make sure that we tone things down… the discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular … has really changed, and I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and a lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement. I’ve never seen a time that was more divisive or where discourse was less civil. What the Tea Party has done is they have taken it to a different level, and so when they come and disagree with you, you’re not just wrong, you’re the enemy.”
Just over a month ago, Oklahoma Democrat Party Chairman Wallace Collins told Fox News, “Is he (OKGOP Chairman Pinnell) forgetting the fact that the bombing was done by somebody of his bent – in other words a right-winger? If Timothy McVeigh were alive today, he most likely would be a Tea Partier.”
The Oklahoma Republican Party called on Chairman Collins to apologize for his offensive remarks, but he refused. When called on to repudiate their party’s leader, the Democrat Leaders in the House and Senate – Scott Inman and Sean Burrage – were silent as they were preoccupied scaring Oklahoma taxpayers about the mass hysteria that would unfold if we cut taxes. To date, Chairman Collins and Oklahoma Democrat leaders still have not apologized for comparing their political opponents to the worst domestic terrorist in American history.
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But hang on, he will be blaming Bush soon.
President Obama’s spokesman today blamed Europe for the rise in unemployment, though he noted that the economy did add some jobs.
“We’re digging out of a very deep hole,” Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today. “We’re also seeing continued instability in the Eurozone.”
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(CNSNews.com) – The number of American women who are unemployed was 766,000 individuals greater in May 2012 than in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In January 2009, there were approximately 5,005,000 unemployed women in the United States, according to BLS. In May 2012, there were 5,771,000.
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The second time so far today obama has blamed Europe!
President Obama attributed the rise in unemployment to European struggles and high gas prices in the United States, when he spoke to Minnesotans today.
“As we learned in today’s jobs report, we’re still not creating them as fast as we want,” Obama said. “We had high gas prices, a month two months ago,” he said, “and then, most prominently, most recently, we’ve had a crisis in Europe’s economy that is having an impact worldwide; and it’s starting to cast a shadow on our own [economy] as well.”
“We can’t fully control what happens in other parts of the world,” Obama said, again citing “what’s going on in Europe.”
He then blamed Congress for failing to pass his jobs bill. “Congress should’ve passed a bill a long time ago to put thousands of construction workers back on the job,” he said.
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Boehner to Bloomberg: Are you kidding me?
Bill Clinton Praises Donald Trump: “I Like Him”
New York court: Calling someone gay isn’t slander
MSNBC Host Upset Romney Using Same Campaign Tactics As Obama
Domino’s Pizza CEO: Bain Capital and Romney were ‘terrific,’ helped make us ‘successful’
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