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Childhood Lead Exposure Causes a Lot More Than Just a Rise in Violent Crime

by PearlXHKPliajoj Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.

This is not a brand new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. The chart on the right shows the correlation between gasoline lead exposure and later rates of teen pregnancy, and it’s very strong. Stronger even than the correlation with violent crime.

None of this should come as a surprise. The neurological basis for the lead-crime theory suggests that childhood lead exposure affects parts of the brain that have to do with judgment, impulse control, and executive functions. This means that lead exposure is likely to be associated not just with violent crime, but with juvenile misbehavior, drug use, teen pregnancy, and other risky behaviors. And that turns out to be the case. Reyes finds correlations with behavioral problems starting at a young age; teen pregnancy; and violent crime rates among older children.

It’s a funny thing. For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline. Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems. In the end, though, it turned out that conservatives were right. It wasn’t just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.

But liberals were right that it wasn’t related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn’t suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn’t suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down.

Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline.

This doesn’t mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them. But the volume of the argument really ought to be lowered a lot. Maybe poverty makes a difference, maybe single parenting makes a difference, and maybe evolving societal attitudes toward child-rearing make a difference. But they probably don’t make nearly as much difference as we all thought. In the end, we’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t poison your kids. That makes more difference than all the other stuff put together.

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Childhood Lead Exposure Causes a Lot More Than Just a Rise in Violent Crime

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

by CorrineLey Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any cargo train, though: It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca.

How do 1,300 people fit on top of a cargo train, you ask? By crowding on like this:

Central Americans on the Beast, June 20. Rebecca Blackwell/AP

After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

The announcement comes on the heels of President Obama’s $3.7 billion emergency appropriations request to deal with the ongoing surge of unaccompanied Central American child migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. Many Central Americans take the trains to avoid checkpoints throughout Mexico—and the robbers and kidnappers known to prey on migrants. But riding the Beast can be even more perilous. Migrants often must bribe the gangs running the train to board, and even then, the dangers are obvious: Many migrants have died falling off the train, or lost limbs after getting caught by its slicing wheels.

Why, though, hasn’t the Mexican government cracked down sooner? Adam Isacson, a regional-security expert at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, says the responsibility of guarding the trains often has fallen to the rail companies—who usually turn around and argue that since the tracks are on government land, it should be the feds’ problem. (Notably, the train line’s concession is explicitly for freight, not passengers.)

In his radio interview, Osorio Chang also signaled a tougher stance against Central American migrants, in general. “Those who don’t have a visa to move through our country,” he said, “will be returned.”

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

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Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan

by JoleneTKWwi Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a huge cheerleader for the controversial budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have partially privatized Medicare and slashed social spending programs. Now McConnell, who’s in a tough reelection fight, is backing away from his support and trying to suggest he was not an outright champion of this draconian budget measure.

In an ad released this week, McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, attacks the GOP senator for backing Ryan’s 2011 budget proposal, which would have essentially ended Medicare as a guaranteed federal program, slashed Medicaid, and repealed Obamacare. In the ad, an elderly Kentucky man named Don Disney asks why McConnell voted to raise his medical costs by thousands of dollars a year—referring to a provision in the Ryan budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would hike out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,000.

McConnell’s campaign fired back, pointing out that the senator did not vote for the proposal itself, but rather only voted in favor of bringing the measure to the Senate floor for a vote. “There is no way to speculate” what McConnell would have done regarding a final vote on the Ryan budget, his campaign insists.

But that’s cutting the legislative sausage rather thin. The vote on whether to bring the Ryan plan to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote was the key vote—and McConnell voted in favor of the proposal. It was only because the majority Democrats blocked the bill from reaching a final vote that McConnell did not have a chance to officially vote for passage of the budget proposal. But McConnell himself bragged about having “voted” for the Ryan budget. And he repeatedly praised the Ryan plan and expressed support for the measure.

In a speech on the Senate floor in April 2011, McConnell called Ryan’s budget a “serious and detailed plan for getting our nation’s fiscal house in order.” He maintained that it would “strengthen the social safety net.”

That month, he also called Ryan’s budget “a serious, good-faith effort to do something good and necessary for the future of our nation and…for the good of the nation,” according to Congressional Quarterly.

In May 2011, McConnell, appearing on Fox News, vowed to vote for Ryan’s proposal. He said Ryan’s plan was “a very sensible way to go to try to save Medicare.”

Even though the Senate never held a final vote on the Ryan budget, McConnell’s backing for the plan—which included large tax cuts for the wealthy—was full-throated and unambiguous. “He’s probably relieved that it never came to a final vote,” says Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.

In responding to the Grimes ad, McConnell’s campaign also took issue with the charge that he voted to raise medical costs for Kentucky seniors by $6,000 each. The campaign claimed that this figure is out of date because Ryan’s subsequent budget plans—which also were not passed by Congress—would raise Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs by much less. Yet Paul Van De Water, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says that the Grimes campaign “accurately” cited what the 2011 plan would have done.

Ryan’s 2011 budget would have slashed Medicare by $389 billion by raising the eligibility age and partly privatizing the program, dramatically increasing costs for new retirees. Under the same plan, funding for Medicaid would have been slashed by 35 percent over 10 years. The proposal additionally would have ended Obamacare, preventing millions from obtaining affordable health insurance. At the time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid warned the Ryan budget “would be one of the worst things that could happen in this country if it went into effect.”

As the McConnell-Grimes race—one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year—heats up, Grimes is attempting to tar McConnell with the extreme budget plan that he once embraced. McConnell, the veteran Capitol Hill wheeler-and-dealer, is trying to wiggle out of the trap through a legislative loophole—creating a false impression and distancing himself from his party’s policymaker-in-chief.

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan

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The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

by CarmellBainton Posted on July 6, 2014

Mother Jones

For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn’t have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spend months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were “incidental” collections from bystanders.

So was all of this worth it? The Post’s review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

….If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, they stretch to the limit—and probably beyond—the rules for defining who is and isn’t a US person. Click the link for more.

1Naturally the NSA has an explanation:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about “raw” intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.

“We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic…” Litt said. “Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”

Silly intelligence committee members. They should have specifically asked about access to processed content.

Jesus. If someone in Congress isn’t seriously pissed off about this obvious evasion, they might as well just hang up their oversight spurs and disband.

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The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

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Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

by Tamera0164 Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

A recently produced infographic from the Department of Homeland Security shows that the majority of unaccompanied children coming to the United States are from some of the most violent and impoverished parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The map documents the origins of child migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol from January 1 to May 14. It was made public by Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, and it includes the following analysis about the surge in child migrants:

…Many Guatemalan children come from rural areas, indicating that they are probably seeking economic opportunities in the US. Salvadoran and Honduran children, on the other hand, come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the US preferable to remaining at home.

This echoes what I found in my yearlong investigation into the explosion of unaccompanied child migrants arriving to the United States. As I wrote in the July/August issue of Mother Jones:

Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are minors from Mexico and from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest, these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world’s highest murder rate. El Salvador has the second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.

Below is a more granular look at where kids are coming from, also produced by DHS. San Pedro Sula, the world’s most violent city, was home to the largest number of child migrants caught by the Border Patrol (more than 2,500). Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, sent the second-most kids, fewer than 1,000.

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Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

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Here’s the Full Justice Department Memo That Allowed Obama To Kill an American Without Trial

by DomingoDDXA Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

In September 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical US-born cleric, was killed â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;in an American drone strike in Yemen. His death was the first public example of the US government targeting and killing one of its own citizens abroad based on the suspicion of terrorist activities, though the names of other Americans also appear on the Obama administration’s “kill list.”

Last year, NBC’s Michael Isikoff published a Justice Department “white paper” that details the legal rationale for targeting American citizens. Now, as the result of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the New York Times and the ACLU, the public has access to a redacted version of the full 2010 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel justifying the Obama administration’s controversial Awlaki assassination. You can read it below:

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Here’s the Full Justice Department Memo That Allowed Obama To Kill an American Without Trial (PDF)

Here’s the Full Justice Department Memo That Allowed Obama To Kill an American Without Trial (Text)

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Here’s the Full Justice Department Memo That Allowed Obama To Kill an American Without Trial

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Neo-Confederate Ally Chris McDaniel Moves One Step Closer to Winning Mississippi’s Senate Race

by PhilomenaRawson Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

For months, conservatives have thrown their money and might behind Mississippi state Senator Chris McDaniel in an effort to defeat longtime Sen. Thad Cochran in the state’s GOP Senate primary. Tea party activists swooned over McDaniel as the candidate who, in a year of failed challenges from the right, could succeed in knocking off a GOP incumbent. Mississippians went to the polls on Tuesday and gave McDaniel a slight edge over Cochran. A run-off is likely. With a fired-up base behind him, McDaniel is in a solid position to defeat the six-term senator.

As Mother Jones has reported, McDaniel is a southern conservative with a controversial track record. Last summer, he delivered the keynote address at an event hosted by a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group that, as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, “promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the ‘war of southern independence.'” McDaniel spoke at past Sons of Confederate Veterans-affiliated events, according to a spokesman for the group.

From 2004 to 2007, McDaniel hosted a syndicated Christian conservative radio program, Right Side Radio. Once, McDaniel weighed in on gun violence in America by blaming “hip-hop” culture. “The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns,” he said in a promotional sampler for the radio show. “It has everything to do with a culture that is morally bankrupt. What kind of culture is that? It’s called hip-hop.” He went on:

Name a redeeming quality of hip-hop. I want to know anything about hip-hop that has been good for this country. And it’s not—before you get carried away—this has nothing to do with race. Because there are just as many hip-hopping white kids and Asian kids as there are hip-hopping black kids. It’s a problem of a culture that values prison more than college; a culture that values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry; a culture that can’t stand education. It’s that culture that can’t get control of itself.

McDaniel also used his radio show to defend the efficacy—despite reams of evidence saying otherwise—of torture as a way to gather intelligence.

In April, McDaniel raised eyebrows when he appeared on a different radio show, “Focal Point,” hosted by the Bryan Fischer, an top official at the rabidly anti-gay American Family Association. Here’s a brief rundown of Fischer’s penchant for bomb throwing:

In March, Fischer told his listeners that while he didn’t think President Obama is the antichrist, “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Oval Office. He has said that people turn to homosexuality (which he’d like criminalized) when the Devil takes over their brains. He once called for a Sea World Orca whale to be Biblically stoned after it killed its trainer. He said the secretarial job in his office is “reserved for a woman because of the unique things that God has built into women.” Even some Republicans have distanced themselves from Fischer—at the 2011 Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, Mitt Romney condemned Fischer’s “poisonous language.”

Mark your calendars: A McDaniel-Cochran run-off would take place on June 24.

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Neo-Confederate Ally Chris McDaniel Moves One Step Closer to Winning Mississippi’s Senate Race

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

by FletcheDriscoll Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that it was creating a multiagency taskforce to oversee the recent surge of unaccompanied child migrants coming primarily from Central America and Mexico. The announcement included plans to move some 600 kids from holding cells at the border to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

As the number of unaccompanied children entering the United States has more than doubled since 2011, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—the part of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with caring for unaccompanied minors in US custody—has brought more and more shelters online to accommodate the influx. (Kids are typically housed in these shelters until ORR can reunify kids with US-based family, with whom they stay pending their immigration hearings.) Here’s what the increase has looked like:

So where, exactly, are these shelters? Fifty of the 80 shelters in 2013 were in states along the Southwest border; Texas alone had 33 shelters. The rest, however, are spread out throughout the country. As Maria Woltjen, director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told me in an interview: “Nobody in Chicago knows there are 400 kids detained in our midst. You walk by, and you think it’s just an old nursing home, and it’s actually all these immigrant kids who are detained inside.”

Check out our map of ORR’s 2013 shelters, data I obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request:

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

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Republicans Are Claiming the New Climate Rules Will Wreck the Economy. They’re Wrong.

by Celeste3326 Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today the Environmental Protection Agency announced its much anticipated plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, the source of about a third of US emissions. It turns out the regulations will be pretty ambitious: a 30 percent decrease in emissions in this sector from 2005 levels by the year 2030 (though some say that is still not enough).

Critics are out in force, of course, and their chief tactic seems to be economic alarmism. Earlier this morning, the front page of Drudge Report displayed this image (bizarrely, as the new rules have nothing to do with oil and wouldn’t drive up gas prices):

Screenshot/Drudge Report

Indeed, the economic doomsaying arguments are everywhere in relation to the new EPA rules. Even before the rules were announced, the National Mining Association was running ads claiming that “an 80 percent cost hike in electricity bills is something we better get used to if extreme new Obama administration power plant regulations take effect.” Also prior to the rules’ actual release, the US Chamber of Commerce put out a study asserting that the consequence of the regulations would be 224,000 lost jobs per year and a $50 billion annual economic hit (up through the year 2030).

And then, there were the elected Republicans: James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator, claimed the regulations would “cost Americans a fortune.” John Boehner, meanwhile, called them a “sucker punch for families everywhere.” And don’t miss tweets like these from members of Congress:

The EPA, of course, radically disagrees with all of this, and thinks the economic benefits of the new rules should greatly exceed their costs. So who should you trust?

Well, how about history: There is a long tradition of cost overestimates for new environmental regulations. At the Huffington Post, Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick provides an extensive documentation, going back to the 1970s, arguing that such claims of huge costs not only have a long history, but that they are “always wrong.”

Among other things, Gleick links to a 2011 EPA study finding that the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments (which, of course, were attacked on grounds of supposed cost) “exceeded costs by a factor of more than 30 to one.” That’s not the only such study. In fact, as the World Resources Institute’s Ruth Greenspan Bell has noted, from 1999 to 2009, EPA water and clean-air regulations overall were clear cost-benefit winners. The total costs, according to a 2010 Office of Management and Budget report, were some $26-$29 billion, while the benefits were far greater: $82-$533 billion.

Dubiousness aside, the striking thing about all of these attacks is that they’re depressingly presentist, missing the big picture about the transformative effect that climate change is having on our world as it unleashes stunning impacts whose ultimate costs are sure to be mindboggling (like, say, 10 feet of sea level rise affecting every coastal city on the planet).

Fortunately, we turned to Bill Nye the Science Guy for some bigger picture perspective. He gave us this statement today: “We have a long way to go in addressing climate change,” he said. “Coal will be controversial for a long time yet. But the longest journey starts with a single step. This is a good one. Let’s get started.”

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Republicans Are Claiming the New Climate Rules Will Wreck the Economy. They’re Wrong.

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Obama Administration Sued for Refusing to Disclose Data on Student Loan Debt Collectors

by toman38ybt Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama has taken several steps over the past few years to address the $1 trillion problem of student loan debt. He’s pushed loan forgiveness programs and efforts to help borrowers reduce payments. One thing that apparently isn’t factoring into his plans, though, is reining in abusive debt collectors that the Department of Education hires to collect student loans debt when people can’t pay.

More than $94 billion of the nation’s student loan debt was in default as of September 2013, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. And the percentage of people defaulting on school loans has increased steadily for six years in a row. In 2011, the Department of Education paid private debt collectors $1 billion to try to collect on that debt—a number that is expected to double by 2016. The tactics used by those debt collectors range from harassing to downright abusive. In March 2012, Bloomberg reported that three of the companies working for the Department of Education had settled federal or state charges that they’d engaged in abusive debt collection.

Consumer advocates have found that the debt collectors routinely violate consumer protection laws when trying to collect on student loan debt, which is especially problematic given that some of those firms are supposed to be helping borrowers “rehabilitate” their loans to reduce their debt burden. The student loan collectors have vast power, including the ability to garnish wages and seize tax refunds—tools not normally available to companies collecting ordinary consumer debt.

In March 2012, the Department of Education said it was reviewing the commissions it paid debt collectors in the wake of complaints that the contractors were abusing borrowers. But so far, there’s not much evidence that anything has changed. The GAO report found that the Education Department still does little to oversee student-loan debt collectors, and has done little more than provide “feedback” when alerted to abuses.

The National Consumer Law Center has been highlighting the problems with student-loan debt collectors for a few years now, and watchdogging the Department of Education’s work in this area. Or at least it’s been trying to. Since 2012, the non-profit advocacy group has filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for information about the government’s relationships with student-loan debt collectors. But so far, the Obama administration has stonewalled the requests. On Monday, after more than year attempting to peel back the secrecy around the debt collection contracts, NCLC filed a lawsuit demanding that the Department of Education comply with the Freedom of Information Act and release the data.

“Collection agencies routinely violate consumer protection laws and prioritize profits over borrower rights,” says Persis Yu, an attorney with NCLC. “Abuses by these debt collection agencies cause significant hardship to the millions of students struggling to pay off their federal student loans. Taxpayers and student loan borrowers have a right to information about the impact of the Education Department’s policy of paying outside debt collectors on the rights of borrowers. The Education Department should not insulate itself from public scrutiny.”

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Obama Administration Sued for Refusing to Disclose Data on Student Loan Debt Collectors

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