Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the Department of Education to cancel all student loans issued to students at the now-notorious (and now-defunct) Corinthian Colleges between July 2011 and September 2014. Corinthian, as you may know, has become the poster child for the evils of for-profit colleges, promising students heightened job prospects -- in exchange for high-interest, high-fee loans, of course. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Corinthian in late 2014 for the cost of all student loans handed out to Corinthian students since July 2011, totaling some $530 million, and a U.S. District Judge in Illinois ruled in the CFPB's favor some two months ago; Corinthian has, in the meantime, declared bankruptcy and dissolved such that it can't actually pay the damages. So forgiving the loans would seem the fair thing to do. And no, there is no "moral hazard" in forgiving loans that never should have been issued in the first place. More politicians should attend to the actual moral hazard of extorting students based on lies.
Meanwhile, a collection of good-government organizations have begun a Sign Here Now petition helping you tell our government to put people over big pharmaceutical corporations. Martin Shkreli's behavior in hiking Daraprim's price more than fiftyfold is just one data point, and don't let anyone tell you he's an exception to the rule -- big pharma corporations typically hike drug prices so they can "fund research on new life-saving medications," but then spend a big chunk of their largesse on advertising, which, as you know, is not research. Then they try to take advantage of the tax system by stashing their profits offshore, or reincorporating as foreign corporations so they can shirk even more of their obligation to our communities, as Pfizer is trying to do. All this, while seniors pay more in Medicare's drug program because our laws prevent Medicare from negotiating its own drug prices, and tens of millions of good Americans let prescriptions for needed medications go unfilled last year simply because they couldn't afford to fill them. This hardly seems like the America I grew up in sometimes -- but that's why we fight.
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