If Michael Myers and other Halloween-related phenomenon (like inebriated Ewoks) make you jumpy, the practices of many for-profit (“proprietary”) schools should give you chills all year. The Washington Monthly just published a great article on the aggressive and misleading marketing that some of these schools engage in, as well as the disturbing way that they push students into dangerous levels of debt.
In a nutshell, many of the institutions in this sector ultimately care about one thing: getting “asses in classes.” Aggressive recruiters often oversell chances and salaries of graduates, as well as other aspects of the program, and pay little attention to whether the student can benefit at the school or whether they have any chance of paying off their loans. (more…)
As I mentioned in a previous post, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is an energy efficiency geek and that’s why he is loved by anyone that has a rational view on energy policy.
Today he gave us efficiency geeks another reason to gloat by writing a fantastic piece on HuffingtonPost explaining in plain words the importance of home weatherization (or ”saving money by saving energy” as he likes to say) and outlining new federal programs to help average Americans cope with the high upfront cost that comes with reducing residential energy use.
Just like Berkeley’s fantastic solar initiative, the new Department of Energy plan will make low-interest loans available for people investing in efficiency improvements in their homes. The loan will be tied to your property taxes and therefore stay with the house.
The homeowners might pay an extra $400 per year on their property tax bill but save $500 a year on their utility bill. Since the financing would be attached to the property tax bill, both the savings and the loan payments stay with the house if the owners decide to sell.
These are the type of programs that will make sustainability improvements accessible to everyday Americans and that result in saving people money, reducing harmful carbon pollution, cleaning up our air, and creating millions of new jobs.
Unfortunately, all the programs announced by the Secretary of Energy are backed by a token sum that isn’t nearly enough to rapidly and effectively reduce our emissions at the levels they need to be.
Every week, tons of groups come out with great videos about the climate crisis. Some focus on youth activism, some are just plain funny, while others are compelling more than any before. I’ll try to share the best ones with you all in a semi-weekly blog post. Happy viewing!
Fist off, legislators and the media love to say that people don’t support climate legislation even though every poll and common sense show the opposite. Check out the RepowerWall and add your voice to demonstrate the unstoppable avalanche of support for ending the climate crisis:
Can you imagine if every child in the world knew how much older generations are dragging their feet on climate? I can’t, but fortunately Moms Against Climate Change did the thinking for me, check it out:
And finally, exposing corruption. Dunno if you heard, but a bunch of coal industry lobbyists were recently caught red (green?) handed for sending fake letters to congresspeople from groups of color in opposition to the climate bill. As much as most of our reaction would be to punch them in the face, the Avaaz Action Factory one-upped them by wearing astro-turf suits and shaking the culprit’s hands. Check out these courageous fighters:
The push for health care reform is moving fast and furiously, so I thought it’d be helpful to have semi-daily “Health on the Hill” updates that should help you keep track of the reform debate and get to the meat of the issue. Enjoy!
Today’s Updates – 10/29/09:
Today marked a big day in the health care reform journey that we have all been on this year, and it was an even bigger day for those that have been fighting this fight for decades. The House of Representatives released their health care bill today — and made quite the production of it, with Speaker Pelosi and about half of the Democratic Caucus entering the stage of the press conference to U2 blaring over the loud speakers. Standing there on the stage behind these proud Members of Congress filing in to Bono made me think about what a special day for celebration it was, while simultaneously thinking about how oddly comical politics can be sometimes. As Representatives danced their way to their seats, and Pelosi took the podium, the tone of this significant announcement settled down and focused on the real reasons why we were all there: to ensure health care coverage for those that need it, make insurance affordable for everyone and stop the horrible practices of the insurance companies.
Along with many Representatives that spoke on the various provisions included in the bill, such as the long-debated public option and strong affordability measures, constituents from each of their districts shared their personal hardships with our current health system. One such story almost knocked me off of the stage. A mother of three triplets that were conceived by In Vitro Fertilization was denied health insurance based on a claim that she had a pre-existing condition of “infertility”, and her husband was denied coverage based on “spousal infertility” as a pre-existing condition. These are the kinds of ridiculous practices that will now be illegal.
The House bill will not only end denials based on pre-existing conditions, gender, age or income, but it will insure 96% of the population, expand Medicaid to more low-income Americans, offer a health insurance exchange in which plans can be purchased, including a public plan provided by the government (the public option), and it will reduce the deficit by $30 billion over the first ten years. This bill came out to be pretty strong — We’ll just have to see whether the public option stays in the bill on its journey from the House floor to Conference (when the House and Senate bills are merged), and if it does remain in the final legislation, how many people will really have access to it. As it stands now, the Congressional Budget Office has said that only about 6 million people would gain insurance through the public option included in this new House legislation.
However, one of the biggest victories in the bill for our generation — the Millenial generation of young adults ages 18-34– was the provision to extend coverage under our parents’ insurance plan up to our 27th birthday. This provision comes at no cost to taxpayers and is just a common sense solution to ensuring coverage for young adults.
All in all it was a happy day for health care and a reminder that we still have a journey ahead of us as we await the CBO score for the Senate bill and look forward to both chambers hashing it out on the floor to debate their legislation and get us one step closer to a strong bill for health care reform.
However, the House is always an entirely different cup of tea than the Senate..so a bumpy road may still lie ahead!
What time did you wake up yesterday morning? I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to go down to the Dirksen Senate Office Building and attend the first hearing for the new climate bill. The bill, co-sponsored by Senator Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Boxer (D-CA), is called the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act — aka CEJAPA and is similar in many ways to the recently passed American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in the House.
Along with other 10 young people, dressed in Halloween garbs or green t-shirts , we tried to get into the hearing room to show that young people are paying attention and are ready to hold our elected officials accountable. Unfortunately, due to corporate hired linestanders, we weren’t able to get in. Linestanders you ask? Yup, here is how it works:
Hearing rooms are small, especially considering that most seats go to Senate staffers (from offices of Senators who aren’t on the committee) and press. Most hearings are held with barely any ordinary citizen in the room, but some contentious ones — like recent healthcare, defense and climate hearings – fill up pretty quick. The few spots left are open on a first-come, first-serve basis meaning that people need to make sure to get there early if they care to have a seat in clear view of the senators and the CSPAN cameras.
Just like young people desperately want legislators to see them (and we make sure they do by wearing bright green t-shirts, holding hard hats on our laps, and holding small 8.5 x 11 signs), so do the lobbyists that bring so much money to their election coffers. Thirteen line-standers for corporate lobbyists were in line ahead of us, but there were only nine seats were available in the room so we weren’t successful this time around. Young people waiting in line made a pretty big splash nonetheless by talking to Senators and press as they were making their way into the room.
After making sure that the young people who came from as far as Maryland were OK with going to the overflow room, I darted back to the office to listen to the hearing through the Committee website (more hearings are going on today and tomorrow, check them out here if you are interested).
The hearings were surprisingly interesting. For minute-to-minute summary, check out my live-blog about the opening remarks and about the testimonies. There were three things that came up during the hearing that every person concerned about the climate crisis should know:
Fact #1: 47 million people are uninsured while another 87 million are underinsured
Fact #2: 18,000 people die every year because of a lack of proper health care.
Fact #3: 73% of physicians support a public option.
(Want more facts? Click here)
When looking at the facts, the answer to how to fix our broken health care system seems obvious. As the health care debate continues, the art of politics, or should I say, the bureaucracy within our democratic Congress, has made this answer more complicated than it should be.
Yesterday morning, Campus Progress attended a hearing, “Costs of Broken Health Care System, Benefits of Public Option,” hosted by Representative Jackson-Lee and Representative Conyers, who convened patients, physicians, and experts to push for a robust public option.
This hearing was by no means a political debate about health care; it was instead, an opportunity for individuals to give testimony to why the public option plays a fundamental role in the health and happiness of all Americans. While many of us are trying to understand the politics of the health care reform legislation, the answer becomes clear once you listen to the tragedies that many of our fellow Americans have had to endure due to poor or no coverage.
During the hearing, we watched a 3-minute clip of a film, “Reinventing Paradise,” where the producer, Natalie Noel, was also present and gave testimony. Natalie is a cancer patient whose insurance coverage was recently terminated and her 3-minute clip captures stories of Gulf Coast residents who have suffered health-care hardships post-Katrina. Representative Jackson-Lee responded to Noel’s film and testimony by stating, “although all of us want to believe we live in a democracy…we know some are left out; the sick, the frail, the mentally ill…those who can’t tell their stories.”
There were more than twenty witnesses who gave testimony, including a woman named Joan Kosloff. Joan came to the hearing on behalf of her son, Eric, who died last year to pneumonia due to his lack of health insurance. As Joan gave her testimony, pictures were passed around of Eric (who was 44) and his 3 year old daughter—it was very difficult to hold back tears. After her testimony, Dr. Carson of Johns Hopkins responded, “we must build a powerful coalition of consciousness” to remind members of Congress of what the consequences may be without a public option.
While every member of Congress is faced with 3.5 lobbyists working for insurance companies, testimonies like these should win out over lobbyist propaganda because these stories unveil the truth that this fight is no longer for a public “option,” it is for a public necessity.
Join our friends at Choice USA for a National Call-In Day TODAY to support comprehensive sex education!
It is wide-spread knowledge that abstinence-only sex education has not proven to be effective in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies. There has even been a highly conclusive congressional study showing that it has grievously failed our society as a substitute for sex education. However, leaders of our nation still insist on using our money to fund wishful thinking instead of facts, thereby cheating young adults of comprehensive sex education and putting their health and future at risk.
In a little-known subplot of the health care reform discussion, ineffective abstinence education just might get a big boost, thanks to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Sen. Hatch proposed an amendment to the Senate Finance Committee health care proposal to give $50 million in funding to abstinence-only programs. The amendment just squeaked by (with 12 out of 23 votes) to rear its disingenuous head in the committee’s final bill.
Concerned citizens living in areas where abstinence-only programs are currently taught could turn to more successful strategies of sex education, once government funding expires in the coming years. But now, if Hatch’s amendment makes it to the reform bill that reaches President’s Obama’s desk, we can all look forward to incomprehensive sex education that could result in another decade of increasing rates of HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs).
Responsible legislators must block this bogus amendment from getting through Congress. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), who supports comprehensive, effective sex education, is in the small group that is compiling the Senate’s final health care reform bill, and it is imperative that he eliminate Hatch’s agenda from their plan. We owe it to our nation’s youth, and to all those who have suffered from disease and unwanted pregnancy because they were never given realistic tools to prevent it.
Join Choice USA NOW for a National Call-In Day to support comprehensive sex education!
*This blog was written by Carly Groff, Advocacy Intern
The Apollo Group (the parent company of the University of Phoenix) revealed in its annual disclosure report to investors that the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Enforcement Division is looking into its “revenue recognition practices.”
It looks like this has something to do with the way that the company counts financial aid dollars as revenue. Since they have to reimburse the federal government when a student receiving aid drops out, the company could be in some real trouble if SEC finds that they have not been subtracting the reimbursements properly when reporting their “revenue.”
This comes at the same time as a lawsuit against the company for questionable marketing practices. The suit, filed under the False Claims Act, alleges that the company owes the government billions of dollars for compensating recruiters based on the number of students that they enroll. This practice is illegal under US education law, and an important protection for students, who could be pressured into expensive programs that will not ultimately help them, and taxpayers, who often have to foot the bill. The University of Phoenix is the largest recipient of federal student loan dollars in the US.
The company now has 443,000 students, which makes it bigger than the entire California State University System.
Secretary of the Department of Energy, Stephen Chu (a hero of energy efficiency dorks like me).
11:27 ‘Today I want to focus on the Energy Opportunity’ Hurray for CAP memes making it in the hearings!
11:28 China has made the choice. they are spending billions in clean energy, transmission,… my feed froze!!
11:30 ‘Obama announces billion dollar investments in smart grid technology! Hurray for rational people in the White House!’
Secretary of Department of Transportation, Ray LaHood
11:32 Acknowledging role of transit for climate reductions. Great to see that, but doesn’t really fall under climate bill purview…
11:33 Talking about smart growth. Can you believe it?! Only 2 years ago the Department of Transportation was working to subsidize suburbia!
Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar
11:37 ‘First energy independence, Second jobs, third healthy planet and safety of our children.’ Really? Your priorities are a little off.
11:39 ‘My department is the Carbon capture department’ (and the carbon extraction one!)
11:40 ‘We drill a lot of oil in our public lands, but at the Department we are mostly excited about the new energy frontiers’ ‘ We are fast-tracking deployment of clean energy, both sun, off-shore, on-shore’
11:42 ‘Our public lands can sequester carbon just as what will happen with investments in Indonesia and Brazil in CEJAPA’
— Editorial comment: these witnesses are not as fun as senators… + they don’t talk about young people!—
** For witness statements, go to the next post, here **
Just got back from the Senate office building where young people didn’t manage to enter the committee room.
10:47 Am – Voinovich doesn’t like the bill, big surprise
10:49 – Boxer ‘Climate change won’t be waiting for who is a democrat or who is a republican.’ Would like bi-partisanship but Senate lacks a Warner-like Republican.
10:50 – Voinovich ‘Building wind turbines is approximately the same as building nuclear power plants’ – does that include cost on waste disposal?
10:51 – Boxer ‘I am not advocating for taxpayers to build windmills OR nuclear. Trying to level the playing field so technologies can compete fairly’ – There you go!
10:53 – Lautenberg ‘We are looking at number of pages of bills to identify veracity. I didn’t know people were so concerned about trees!’ Calls for young people to be in the audience!!! Asks for them to testify about why we need to fight for this! Yeea!
10:55 – Lautenberg ‘It would be equally important to hear from the fisherman, asthma victims as much as farmers. We should look into the face of children and explain in their terms. How much would Americans be willing to pay in taxes to reverse these ills!’ My new favorite senator?
10:56 – Lautenberg ‘America wake up! Your kids are in danger! Your country is in danger’
10:59 – Can I just say “Climate deniers lie” every time one speaks? It would get a little redundant to keep on transcribing all of their disinformation (Sen. Barasso is speaking now, where are the Wyoming youth? Call him and tell him to invest in clean energy jobs)
11:00 – Barasso calls fossil fuels Red White and Blue energy… I can see red, but oil is certainly not white or blue!
11:01 – Merkeley “Choice of creating jobs for Americans, or sending jobs overseas” this hearing is all about republicans saying the bill will destroy jobs, while some democrats are saying it will create jobs. Doesn’t seem like anyone is taking the time to understand where the other is coming from.
11:04 – Merkeley “Whenever I ask college students what their top issue is, they always talk about climate change” – “You could argue this bill isn’t moving fast enough!” go get them Merkeley!
Funding our Future is a campaign to pass a progressive federal budget for 2010 and ensure that our nation.s key economic choices invest in our education, spark reform of our health care system, and address climate change through cap and trade and clean energy investments. Click here for more info.
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for October, 2009.
If Michael Myers and other Halloween-related phenomenon (like inebriated Ewoks) make you jumpy, the practices of many for-profit (“proprietary”) schools should give you chills all year. The Washington Monthly just published a great article on the aggressive and misleading marketing that some of these schools engage in, as well as the disturbing way that they push students into dangerous levels of debt.
As I mentioned in a 
The push for health care reform is moving fast and furiously, so I thought it’d be helpful to have semi-daily “Health on the Hill” updates that should help you keep track of the reform debate and get to the meat of the issue. Enjoy!
should I say, the bureaucracy within our democratic Congress, has made this answer 
The Apollo Group (the parent company of the University of Phoenix) revealed in its 
