photo from hereThough Albert Lord as paradigm is unmentioned in the few links this post addresses, Crabgrass has noted him before, here; with sound links on the Student Loan Crisis, here.
Now this, locally, Jim Hightower, Southside Pride, May 2009 - noting basically that student loan current practices are NOT by any measure victimless crime:
Time to end a banker boondoggle that hurts students
What do you call it when arrogance, avarice and absurdity combine? Well, one name for it would be “Sallie Mae.” Despite the sweet name, Sallie is not a person. It’s a giant financial corporation that is America’s largest provider of student loans. It began in the 1970s as a government entity, but in 1997 it was privatized. Along with such other private lenders as Wells Fargo and Discover, Sallie Mae has used the “Family Education Loan Program” to milk windfall profits from college students.
The program is a corporate boondoggle, because the only thing it privatizes are the profits the lenders pocket through hefty fees they levy on students. The industry’s losses, on the other hand, are socialized, for the government covers 97 percent of any loans that students fail to pay. Because this absurd subsidy of private lenders rips off taxpayers while overcharging students, Obama has proposed ending it in favor of expanding the government’s far-more-efficient and less costly program that loans directly to students.
Cutting out the middleman would save taxpayers more than $9 billion a year, while giving college kids a much better deal. Going through private lenders is all the more absurd today, because a government bailout is all that is keeping them afloat. Any money they lend is not private capital, but ours. Why keep subsidizing them to loan our money? Logic, however, is not a concept that bankers even want to grasp, so they are hiring top-gun lobbyists and rallying anti-government ideologues to oppose Obama’s plan—and keep their boondoggle going. Obama is right to halt this multibillion-dollar rip off and to redirect it to help students. For more information, contact PIRG, a national grassroots group: www.uspirg.org.
The PIRG movement - Public Interest Research Group - has been with us for decades, the aim being to focus public attention upon issues that clearly are in the public interest (and which are usually wrongly attended to because there's money in it for special interests that conflict with what's best for the public).
The site Hightower's item links to does not go into history, but has a terse but helpful "about us" page.
Wikipedia has the history, with a Minnesota flavor, a Ralph Nader flavor:
The first PIRG was a public interest law firm started by Ralph Nader in Washington, D.C. and was much different from the modern conception of PIRG. The State PIRGs emerged in the early 1970s on college campuses across the country.
MPIRG (Minnesota) was the first state PIRG to incorporate (on February 17, 1971), and today is one of the few to remain independent from USPIRG and the Fund. Following the lead of Minnesota, students in Oregon (OSPIRG) and then Massachusetts (MASSPIRG), and finally many other states and Canadian provinces incorporated chapters of PIRG. The PIRGs are responsible for many of the Bottle Bills across the country.
After students organized on college campuses for nearly 10 years, the different State PIRGs established the D.C. arm U.S. PIRG to advocate for change on the National level. Nearly simultaneously, the PIRGs founded the Fund For Public Interest Research (FFPIR), the fundraising and citizen outreach arm of the PIRGs. The Fund hires canvassers to go door-to-door or stand on street corners and fundraise for their respective organizations by signing up members and collecting donations (or membership dues). There are roughly 60 Fund canvass offices across the country.
The US-PIRG page specifically on student-and-higher-education issues,is:
http://www.uspirg.org/higher-education
Go there for access to the extensive links list, click the following screenshot for intro info:
Finally, there are specific US-PIRG pages on higher-education issues, (undergrad mainly with maintaining grad school excellence and threats to it a separate issue), see, here, here and for a four-point analysis of the Obama "answer," here.