From the Iowa Department of Public Safety and the State of Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, the following press release:

Des Moines, IOWA — Today, Friday, January 20, 2012, Zachary Edwards, age 29, from Des Moines, Iowa, was arrested and criminally charged with Identity Theft, an Aggravated Misdemeanor (Iowa  Code 715A.8(2)).  Edwards turned himself in to Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) agents this afternoon at the Polk County Jail.  He was then booked into the jail with a set bail of $2,000, cash or surety.

According to the Criminal Complaint, on June 24, 2011, Edwards fraudulently used, or attempted to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz and/or Secretary Schultz’s brother, Thomas Schultz, with the intent to obtain a benefit, in an alleged scheme to falsely implicate Secretary Schultz in perceived illegal or unethical behavior while in office.

Read the full press release here.

Edwards was the 2008 Iowa New Media Director for Barack Obama’s campaign.  The Iowa Republican reported earlier that he is also the Director of New Media for Link Strategies, but the website has apparently since scrubbed all mention of Zach Edwards. However, you can see an earlier snapshot of the page through WayBackMachine. (more…)

Senator Tom Harkin, whose outspoken opposition to Wall Street generally and for-profit schools specifically has made him a leading voice in Congressional regulation of career and for-profit colleges. His office is set to release a report this month – the second in a series – detailing the horrific ramifications of applying free market principles to higher education, but it seems his office may have much to be concerned about given recent details that have emerged about the Senator’s direct involvement in not only the creation and distribution of faulty past reports, but in back-door dealings that should give any American pause.

Last fall, Harkin released a report that his office claimed detailed a host of transgressions on the part of for-profit or “career” colleges from misuse of student loan money to misleading counseling services and high default rates among graduates. The report was criticized by Senate Republicans as “unfair,” and Republicans boycotted subsequent hearings. It was later revealed that the report, compiled – with Harkin’s help – by the GAO, was faulty and many of its findings either fabricated or unusable and the GAO issued fix:

In November 2010, the GAO was forced to release a significantly changed report. The correction affected 16 of the 28 findings in the original report. The bias of the original report was also reflected in the fact that all 16 revisions were all of the same type: changing flawed statements that cast the for-profits in the worst possible light. Error after error took statements out of context or did not accurately portray what was said.

The report, however, had Harkin’s desired effect. Just days after the report was presented at a Senate hearing, the value of for-profit schools’ stock dropped 14% and companies that ran free-market educational facilities lost over $4 billion dollars.

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Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has launched an investigation into the compensation of executives at private sector colleges and universities.

Rep. Elijah Cummings

The New York Times reports:

“The American taxpayers fund these schools through billions of dollars in tuition assistance, but there is little evidence that lavish executive pay is linked to the well-being of the students they are supposed to educate,” Mr. Cummings said in a statement. He said he wanted to determine whether executive compensation was “appropriately tied to the performance of students they educate.”

Strangely, Cummings’ interest in ensuring that students receive good educations and taxpayer dollars are wisely spent does not extend to public community colleges, which are 100 percent taxpayer funded and have comparably low graduation and employment rates. Why do these institutions, which service the same market of students as for-profit colleges and are much more directly under government control, get a free pass?

While he’s at it, why doesn’t Cummings see fit to investigate the absurdly inflated salaries of athletic coaches at many public colleges? Answer: because that wouldn’t be as politically expedient. (more…)

On September 21, 2011, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) spoke to a crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., outside of the Capitol and said, “We need some of you probably getting arrested for doing things you shouldn’t be doing” to save Medicaid.

Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), who is a self-avowed socialist, told MRCTV’s Joe Schoffstall he was at the rally to ’save’ Medicaid and that Republicans care more about representing the ‘wealthiest people in the country’, large campaign contributors and ‘hedge fund people’ than working and low-income families.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Ben Boychuk to discuss how new regulations from Washington will make it harder for the next generation to go to college, the impact of for-profit colleges and the future of higher education.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Many With New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling
Political pressure tainted error-ridden GAO report
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Big Government has covered the Obama Administration’s war on career colleges before, particularly the the Wall Street connections: noted short-seller Steve Eisman, who’s testimony in front of the Department of Education and in Congressional committees is shaping the Administration’s policy and potentially earning Eisman millions. Now, it seems Eisman is trying desperately to distance himself from what appears to be a destructive policy for America’s low-income and minority students.

Recently, the Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed that career colleges and other for-profit educational institutions, be governed by the so-called “gainful employment rule” – a rule that limits or ends federal grant and student loan money for students at for-profit institutions with low graduation rates or low post-graduation employment. Although for-profit schools face essentially the same problems as not-for-profit institutions, students at for-profit schools tend to be lower-income and minority communities, who rely heavily on government assistance to earn the kind of education and skill level necessary to succeed in today’s harsh economic climate.

The rule has met with overwhelming opposition from a number of organizations and communities, and much of that criticism has been leveled at how the Administration came up with the “gainful employment rule.” Recently, it’s become apparent that Steve Eisman’s testimony motivated the Administration’s actions, even if he’s reticent to admit it.

From Business Week:

On April 16, Eisman met with Education Department officials, including acting deputy assistant education secretary David Bergeron, according to Justin Hamilton, a department spokesman. He sent multiple e-mails to a number of Education Department officials, including Duncan, on May 28, two days after airing his views at the Sohn conference in New York. He warned against the watering down of gainful employment, according to the documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request…

‘He shared a PowerPoint that he intended to use for a speech he was planning to give in May,’ Bergeron, the acting deputy assistant education secretary, said in a telephone interview. “It would have been inappropriate for us not to meet with someone that indicated that he had done serious research on the industry.’”

That Power Point contained some very important suggestions, designed to target the problem Mr. Eisman believed for-profit education was causing. One of those suggestions was a very coincidentally named “gainful employment” rule on slides 33 and 34 of his extensive presentation.

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Liberals will tell you they support freedom of choice, but they won’t tell you that freedom they are willing to extend you begins and ends with abortion. Try to exercise it in any other aspect of your life and they’re there, ready to pounce with some regulation or law forbidding you from moving forward with your liberty workout. It doesn’t matter to them what the impact is, they want what they want and they’re willing to step all over you to impose it.

The latest whipping boy in the crosshairs of these statists is the post-secondary for-profit education system. Odds are this battle won’t impact your life directly, but their attacks rarely do. They never attack the heart of that which they seek to control or destroy, they chip away at the edges until it no longer resembles that which it was. It still exists, but in such a way so as to no longer function effectively and eventually dies. Look at what they’ve done to off-shore drilling without so much as passing a law.

For-profit education is the choice for millions of Americans who, for any number of reasons, can’t or choose not to matriculate to traditional colleges and universities. The reasons vary – poor grades in high school, young children at home, etc. These schools serve mostly poor, underprivileged students who have very limited options. You’d think liberals would be for anything that helps the very people they claim to champion. But their rhetoric rarely matches their actions.

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The American public education system is going the way of the auto companies and just like the $17.4 billion American taxpayers forked over to bail out outrageous employee contracts and spineless spending decisions of management, labor unions are hoping their allies in Congress will throw them a lifeline.

The difference, of course, is that prior to the bailout, those private sector companies could actually go bankrupt – no one was “too big to fail.”  There was an invisible mechanism that prevented labor from pushing too far because while it’s greedy, even the UAW knew that there would be a limit to the pay and bennies it could extract from the auto manufacturers.  In that instance, the parasite knew when to stop sucking.

Public schools, largely a monopolistic system not held accountable by competition, don’t have that same invisible force keeping labor in check.  Therefore, if the outrageous demands of labor and current spending practices of school districts outpace the money coming into the coffers, they’ll go out and wring their hands, tell sob stories about Johnny having to sit on Georgie’s lap in class because of a lack of desks and demand more “revenue.”  From you, the taxpayer.

This should be a huge issue for the Tea Party movement.  This has been a problem for far too long and we’ve allowed the tax eaters, that is, teachers unions, to fleece the American public into thinking that more spending, which ultimately ends up in their members’ pockets, somehow equates to better outcomes.

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The two national teachers unions thought they had it all figured out: seek a $23 billion bailout for public schools and it would result in a windfall of dues money.  Nearly $19 million for the National Education Association and almost $8 million for the American Federation of Teachers by my calculation – a handsome payback for the unions’ election support.

But the trough appears to be closing just as the unions were straightening their bibs.

That, of course, is a good thing for the American taxpayers – and the kids the union purports to put first who would ultimately be stuck with the bill.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) recently failed to garner the votes necessary to attach the Keep Our Educators Working Act to a supplemental defense spending bill, but D.C. lawmakers are expected to continue to push for the legislation.

Harkin would have needed 60 votes, and the support of Republicans, to attach the fund as an amendment to the defense bill, which recently passed without the school employee bailout amendment.

“I have no Republicans who will vote for it,” Harkin told Reuters.

My guess is that he’s got a few Democrats eyeing the November election and sensing a pitchfork mentality among the voters and they wouldn’t support it, either.

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The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers, are ramping up attention on Senate Bill 3206, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), which would create a $23 billion “education jobs fund” to hire or retain “150,000 or more” school employees for the next school year.  The NEA is engaged in a “massive, 24/7 lobbying campaign” to pass Harkin’s bill, according to its president Dennis Van Roekel.

That’s $153,333 spent per job just to “retain” them.  The most recent data from the American Federation of Teachers concluded the average teacher salary is $51,009.  Where is the other $100,000 per job going?

Nevertheless, in a recent Senate committee hearing, Harkin cited the “emergency” for creating the fund.  Note he didn’t say teachers, he said “education jobs.”  That’s because in many states, like Michigan, teachers unions are losing members that are custodians or food service workers.

Just for the record, billions of dollars have already been spent on “retaining” school jobs.  The NEA claims 325,000 public school jobs were “saved” under the stimulus bill.

The NEA released a YouTube video with a title which pretty much sums up the union’s entire existence: “The issue is JOBS.”

Of course: the issue is not accountability or test scores or huge amounts of fiscal waste.  It’s simply jobs and therefore union dues.

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As reported in a previous article, Senator Harkin clearly contradicted President Obama when he stated:

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15.

Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Harkin said the deal covered the prescription-drug “donut hole,” the level of federal insurance subsidies, national insurance exchanges and federal Medicaid assistance to states.

Senator Harkin would know if a deal was done as he was in the marathon meeting at the White House on January 13, 2010. On the same day, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid put out a brief joint statement:

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The Hill is reporting that Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, stated that negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts.

From the article:

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15.

Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Harkin said the deal covered the prescription-drug “donut hole,” the level of federal insurance subsidies, national insurance exchanges and federal Medicaid assistance to states.

This cannot be right.

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There has been much speculation that today’s Massachusetts Senate race is a referendum on health care. That may be an understatement.  My guess is that this senate race could have even larger repercussions.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” this past week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it well when he said that President Obama’s plan to bring about “change” to America wasn’t merely limited to health care.  As McConnell noted,

“This arrogant attempt to have the government take over one-sixth of the economy on the heels of running banks, insurance companies, car companies, taking over the student loan business, doubling the national debt in five, tripling in 10. You’ve got … sort of widespread public revulsion.”

Indeed, health care is not all that hangs in the balance.  A September Wall Street Journal columnoutlined President Obama’s next move (presumably, after passing health care): A $100 billion a year government takeover of school loans.

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