7 Policies We're Stuck With Thanks To Stupidity And Greed

Veterans who want to continue their education have access to the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which is great. What's not so great is that the education benefits have a loophole big enough to drive a truck loaded with outdated textbooks through. The problem lies with for-profit colleges. Those are "schools" like DeVry University and the University of Phoenix -- the type of respectable institutions whose mail always winds up in your spam folder. These diploma mills have a history of shady recruitment tactics. DeVry recently had to pay a $100 million settlement for misleading tens of thousands of students about the value of a DeVry "education" -- with those quotation marks being exactly how it must now be referred to.

For-profit schools are especially fond of targeting veterans. Why? It's thanks to something called the 90/10 rule, which makes for-profit schools lose their federal funding if more than 90 percent of their revenue comes from federal student aid programs. This is tricky for these schools, as few parents are willing to bear the full cost of their shitty kids earning a Bachelor in Getting Scammed. However, due to a technicality, the aid veterans get from the Post-9/11 GI Bill is considered privately funded, meaning that to places like DeVry, it counts toward the 10 percent of private tuition that they need to maintain. It's like having your cake and eating it too -- which is probably a full master's program at the University of Phoenix.

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"OK class, we're now going to discuss the PIE-thagorean Theorem."

So why not close that loophole? It seems like a simple solution, and legislation to do exactly that was introduced in 2014. Literally minutes later, it was curb-stomped by Representative John Kline, who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and who happens to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from for-profit schools (they've also spent millions lobbying Congress). If that loophole was closed, many for-profit schools would suddenly be in serious violation of the 90/10 rule and would be forced to take drastic measures, like offering programs that don't make your local community college look like Harvard.

But as it stands, these schools are set to take billions of dollars from the government in exchange for giving a growing number of veterans useless PowerPoint presentations. Shit, John, and all you got for selling out your country's troops was enough for a new gazebo in your gardens. What, did you learn math from a DeVry online course?

We've told you before how dietary supplements are a waste of money at best and actively bad for you at worst, but somehow the industry is still allowed to lie like they're a toddler caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The main culprit here is the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which Hatch wrote. The law basically allows companies to market their product long before the FDA is allowed to study how many milligrams of bullshit is in every pill. That way, by the time it's proven to be snake oil, they've already pulled in their key demographic: gullible idiots.

Lipo Fusion Xtreme
"Take our pills and gain a +10 to fire resistance."

Since then, Hatch has worked to block any proposed laws that have the audacity to suggest that the supplement industry should be regulated like some kind of industry. In return, Hatch has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Big Garbage Pills. In fact, Hatch has been so richly donated to that he has decided to spread the love. His son is a high-paid lobbyist for the supplement industry, as are five of his former aides, among other industry ties. If that all sounds woefully corrupt to you, that's probably because of your low neoprine production. Why not try Hydroxycut?

HydroxyCut
"Now with almost no lead!"

So what if in 2009 and 2010, there were 2,292 recorded serious illnesses, including 33 deaths, caused by supplements? The 83-year-old Hatch has credited his continued good health to them, although our money's on Satan not even wanting him.

Under SB 1070, anyone who couldn't produce papers would be locked up. And who would benefit from a sudden uptick in demand for holding space? Why, the prison-industrial complex! Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce took the idea for SB 1070 to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization which facilitates the private sector in "helping" conservative lawmakers draft bills, which are then shopped around the country. ALEC is a laboratory that doesn't believe in science. Shockingly, ALEC is also more prone to being influenced by money than a child who will only stop talking if you promise them a new video game.

When SB 1070 was being drafted at ALEC, one of its members so happened to be the Corrections Corporation of America, the country's largest private prison company. Talk about serendipity, huh? Of course, CCA helped draft SB 1070 when it was at ALEC, because they believed immigrant detention was their "next big market." Then it went to Arizona's legislature, where two-thirds of the bill's 36 co-sponsors had ties to ALEC. Most of those same co-sponsors then got campaign donations from CCA or other private prisons. The bill passed and went to then-governor Jan Brewer, whose top two advisors used to lobby for the prison industry, for her authorization.

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Spoiler alert: She signed it.

From idea to law, with SB 1070, the prison industry got to write its own ticket for several years. Leave it to corporations to introduce vertical integration into corruption.

In exchange for those little perks, Silver and Skelos continually voted to make 421-a as favorable as possible for Glenwood. The company runs 1,255 apartments over four luxurious buildings, but thanks to adjusted requirements in 421-a, only 209 need to be "affordable." Better yet, families could make over $112,000 a year and still qualify for "affordable" housing, because to Glenwood Management, being upper middle class is the same as being poor.

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Those poor families are living in the squalid hellhole of a medium-sized yacht.

Meanwhile, the program has cost NYC an estimated $3 billion in tax revenue. Revenue that could have gone toward, and we're spitballing here, affordable housing. But hey, at least the system works. The corrupt version of 421-a eventually bit the dust, and Silver and Skelos were both convicted of corruption -- although they're both incredibly wealthy and remain free nearly a year later while their lawyers drag out the appeal process. Oh, and no one from Glenwood was ever charged. Meanwhile, the government is looking at trying out 421-a 2: The This Time We Hopefully Won't Fuck It Up A Whole Bunch Boogaloo, which is heavily backed by Governor Andrew Cuomo -- who has received $1.2 million in campaign funding from Glenwood, so everything's right back on track.

Did we mention that hedge funds are a famously risky form of investment which are better suited for people who have extra cash to gamble with, as opposed to tens of thousands of government workers who absolutely need money for their retirement? Neither did Raimondo. First, the funds charged Rhode Island (and therefore the taxpayers who had their pensions cut) over $200 million in fees. Then the hedge funds, one of which Raimondo happens to have co-founded, underperformed. Badly. We don't know how much money they've already cost state workers. What we do know is how they've spent part of their fees: fucking over state workers, as all three funds are backers of sweeping anti-labor laws.

Wiki Commons
"Oops."

For putting the future of an entire workforce in grubby Wall Street hands, Raimondo was punished by ... being given over $2 million in campaign funding from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and other investment banks for pioneering the idea of putting the future of an entire workforce in their hands. She rode that tsunami of money straight to a successful gubernatorial campaign, and now runs a state that's, uh, desperately trying to reduce the amount of pension money it has in those hedge funds, in favor of safer investments that won't fuck over retirees. Let that be a lesson?

But the three commissioners in charge of the TCEQ took one look at that report, crumpled it up into a little ball, tossed that ball into a public park, and gave Simmons his license anyway in a private hearing. But before you start thinking a billionaire like Simmons was in the business of buying lowly environmental commissioners, you'd be mistaken. He was in the business of buying their bosses, like then-Governor and current ironic Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who happened to have appointed all three commissioners and has coincidentally also received campaign funds from Simmons to the tune of $3 million -- one for each commissioner, it seems.

Tom Fox/Dallas Morning News
"Pre-taxes ... Just kidding, there's no state tax in Texas."

Simmons and Waste Control Specialists then decided to massively increase the scale of their project from a small facility to a sprawling 20-square-mile installation, because if you have enough cash on hand, you can be a real-life Captain Planet villain. Three employees of the TCEQ resigned in disgust. Its executive director also quit, but to get a job as a lobbyist for Waste Control Specialists. Because protecting the environment is nice and all, but Mother Nature ain't going to buy you a Range Rover.

Luckily, despite buying its way past regulatory obstacles, the project finally ground to a halt when an outraged populace teamed up with government watchdogs to stop the sketchy program. Psych! Simmons died and Waste Control Specialists is now struggling to come up with the money they need to continue. If only they had an extra $3 million ...

Waste Control Specialists LLC
We're Completely Screwed

By the mid-'90s, the wetlands' phosphorous levels had been spiked by industrial runoff, and the act mandated that they would be returned to their natural levels by 2003. But despite some progress, by 2003, it was clear that goal wasn't going to be hit. The fault lay mainly with fertilizer used by sugar farms, which destroys plant and animal life about as quickly as dumping barrels of oil mixed with the T-virus into the water. So Florida's legislature heroically passed a bill that extended the deadline indefinitely, as long as the sugar industry could show they were making their "best efforts" to get the job done -- like how a star quarterback passes his college classes. So the Everglades Forever Act became the Everglades Whenever Act, and shockingly, phosphorous levels are now climbing way back up at some sugar farms.

In what we're sure is nothing but a staggering coincidence, the sugar industry has donated nearly a million dollars to Florida Governor Rick Scott, gave an estimated $500,000 to Jeb Bush when he was governor back in 2003, and has also donated over $600,000 to the Republican Party of Florida. Altogether, the sugar industry has donated $2.7 million to various political efforts just since 2011, proving once again that sugar is bad for you.

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Crack rocks with better structure, essentially.

In the meantime, the Everglades Forever deadline is now a soft 2025, and the sugar industry no longer has to pay for the costs -- that's now the taxpayers' burden. But if a U.S. district judge saying that Florida had "violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades" wasn't going to stop them, nothing short of an alligator uprising will.

Mark is on Twitter, and gets a generous kickback if you buy his book.

For more reasons politicians can't be trusted with money, check out 7 Heroically Dumb Projects The Government Blew Your Taxes On and 20 Times Tax Money Was Flushed Down The Toilet.

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