“The U.S. Department of Education is sending emails to about 15,000 people across the country telling them: You’ve got money.

“These are former students — and some parents of students — who took out loans for colleges that shut down between Nov. 1, 2013, and Dec. 4, 2018.  About half attended campuses run by Corinthian Colleges. They will get their money back or have their debt forgiven — an amount estimated at $150 million, all told — under a provision called Automatic Closed School Discharge.

“As part of the Obama-era crackdown on for-profit colleges like ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, the Education Department wrote something called the “borrower defense rule.” It specified how students could get their loan money repaid if their schools were found to be shady. Borrowers had to submit an application and show how they were being defrauded. But if the school was shut down altogether, the loan discharge was supposed to be automatic.

“Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the department took a series of steps to try to delay borrower defense from going into effect, as it was supposed to do in the summer of 2017. DeVos called it: “a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs.”

“But the department lost in court repeatedly and also missed a key technical deadline for replacing the rule. In October, a federal judge ordered that the department begin forgiving loans under the rule. Now, the government seems to be complying with the closed-school portion of the rule, at least.

”Since 2013, 3,600 schools have closed at least one campus, according to the National Student Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group that has filed many lawsuits against the department. Education Corporation of America, another for-profit college chain, officially closed on Dec. 5, stranding another 20,000 students. So the department’s liability could ultimately mean many more millions of dollars beyond the initial $150 million being returned or canceled.

“Meanwhile, there are thousands of students entitled to automatic relief who in all likelihood don’t know it, while the U.S. Department of Education continues to try and weaken the borrower defense rule and to slow-walk the claims of students who say they are being defrauded. Thus does Betsy DeVos, who is devoted to privately funded education and wants local government out of the education “business” ( a business??!)  and who is supposed to be a referee between the ordinary citizen and grasping capitalism, treat the weak and poor, who simply want some qualifications to get a job.”  (based on an article on National Public Radio).

My comment: For-profit schools are supposed to be the Republican answer to publically- funded education. Clearly, this system is not working or workable,  and is doing no favours at all to the children (and their parents) who have entered the lottery of private education.  Kids should not have to raise loans to go to high school.  If schools are taking per-capita public money as well as charging students extra, this is unacceptable. Education for all  is the price the rest of us have to pay in taxes to have new generations grow up employable, knowledgeable and able to make their way in the world.  S it is the level of education – and general knowledge – is hardly stellar; we shouldn’t make it worse.

In February more than 76,000 migrants crossed the Southern border without authorization, an 11 year high.

76,000 illegal immigrants in one month!

This blog is liberal in outlook, and is even run by an immigrant!  However, such a big number is shocking.  Apparently, while the majority of  Latino migrants used to be men, now they are women and children, and, to the disgust of most people, the children are being separated from their mothers and no one seems to know how many separated kids there are, where they have been sent or how to match them up with a parent, so incompetent are the immigration authorities.  All we know is that they are scattered and some are being kept in jail cells or “cages”, as Democrats affirm.

The optics are dreadful; the government should be ashamed.  But not just the American Administration.  The Governments of the Central American countries of origin of the refugees should be even more ashamed, ashamed of their drug economies, the corruption endemic in the region, and the fact that so many citizens are desperate to leave.

Having said this, and sympathized with both the adults and innocent children involved, I still have very mixed feelings about this massive influx of undocumented people.  For any country the numbers are huge .  How do you cope with thousands of mothers with tiny children? Where do you put them?  How will they earn a living with small children to look after?

But there is something else.  I came to America in 1994 with a green card wbich I applied for and received before I left my home country. As soon as possible I applied for (dual) citizenship.  This turned out to be mind-bendingly bureaucratic and lengthy business. They lost my fingerprints three times. Not a process anyone would enjoy, and quite exasperating.  Nonetheless, I struggled through the process and became a US citizen, obeying the law.  I therefore feel rather annoyed that so many people should try to enter the country illegally, assume they will get in with minimal checking or surveillance.

The other aspect of all this immigration is the reaction of people who migrated and now have a settled life and jobs.  Ask them what they think of the undocumented surge and I bet they would want it curtailed.  Why? Because new migrants undercut the wages of more established migrants, which is why immigrants in the UK support Brexit – to reduce the wage competition from East Europeans just arriving.

Life is never simple. But I would maintain that obeying the law, however inconvenient, is the duty of everyone, and of Epicureans in particular.  This is because a peaceful and pleasant life is the object of living, and you cannot achieve ataraxia ignoring the law.

There has been much debate over the profiteering and mismanagement at British privatised enterprises, such as Carillion, a “stark, rotting symbol of everything that has gone wrong with the privatisation of local public services”. What has had little attention is the sell-off of public lands in the UK that started with Margaret Thatcher about 39 years ago.

Since then, all types of public land, held by local and central government alike, has been targeted. And while disposals have generally been heaviest under Tory and Tory-led administrations, they did not abate under New Labour; indeed the NHS estate, in particular, was ravaged during the Blair years. All told, around 2 million hectares of public land have been sold to private interests during the past four decades. This amounts to an eye-watering 10% of the entire British land mass, and is about half of all the land that was owned by public bodies when Thatcher assumed power. The approximate value of that land has been estimated to be £400bn in today’s prices. This dwarfs the value of all of Britain’s other, better known, and often bitterly contested, company privatisations.

Much of the public land was sold to private-sector developers, who have long been the biggest buyers of government land. This was supposed to have helped alleviate Britain’s housing problems, but it has done nothing of the sort. Land has been sold to developers, with the expectation that there would be adequate new housing created. On the contrary developers’ bulging land banks are chock-full of land acquired from public bodies, but they have chosen not to develop it. Now local authorities are in the perverse position of needing enhanced powers to affordably acquire land for a new generation of council houses because, for four decades, they have been forced to sell the land needed for social housing. The cost of this is astounding.

Now half the public land has been sold, and it would be difficult, not to mention politically highly controversial, to get much of that land back, presumably at highly inflated prices.

If today the government could take one single action that would do more than any other to help arrest the intensification of Britain’s housing crisis, halting the sale of public land would be it. To be sure, with so much of Britain’s valuable public land having gone, much of the damage has already been done But if half of it is still left. This land should be protected, treasured, and used for public benefit, before it is too late.

(Based on a new book by Brett Christophers, professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala university. His book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain)

My  comment:  This has been straight theft from future generations.  It was done to benefit the Exchequer as an alternative to putting up taxes (“dear, dear can’t increase taxes on our supporters!”) Now, in no time really, that series of windfalls has been spent.  Because you cannot create new land (statement of the obvious) the value of the scarce former public land steadily goes up to the benefit of the developers, and no one else.  Few new house are being built, but the balance sheets must look great, and donations to you- know who are probably healthy, too.  I don’t know whether this whole catastrophe can be classed as corrupt, but if you think it is, I won’t argue.