Obama To Battle Banks Over Student Loan Business:

President Obama is setting out to attack the student loan business that has placed American youth into perpetual debt. Half of young people are going to college and most of them have been going deeply into debt to the failed American banking system for ten to twenty years of their working lives.

For a number of years now, the cost of higher education has been rising at a rate not only faster than inflation but faster even than the spiraling cost of health care. Under the Bush administration, the cost was shifted from tax payers onto the backs of the young people who were attending college with the beneficiaries being the banking industry. Instead of grants, students are given loans with government guarantees so that even if the students couldn't pay the loans back, the taxpayers would.

In other words, the very people whom the shift was ostensibly intended to help were not receiving that aid. The banking industry was. With interest. Thus driving the actual cost of education even higher.

Now not only are the colleges and universities benefiting from the increased and opaque funding of higher education, but so are the banks, thus helping to fuel the wild and irresponsible speculation that industry was involved in for the past decade. (See The New York Times' story.)

By the way, the Bush family has deep ties with the banking industry.