Obama’s Scandal-Ridden Thugs Now Collect Student Loans

How does one become the recipient of Obama’s cronyism? Apparently, an alternate path to massive campaign donations (à la Solyndra) is being involved in massive scandal. Such is the case with Aspire Resources, who last month became one of the primary collection agencies for government student loans (a trillion dollar industry, before those “greedy” banks handled both the loans and collection thereof). Obama, in what some considered an attack on capitalism, and others a downright unconstitutional act, took over the student loan industry in 2009.

What scandal was Aspire Resources involved in?

With a little digging we found Iowa Student Loans (ISL), the non-profit arm of Aspire Resources, was mired in scandal just months before Obama won the Presidency.

From a 2009 article in the Higher Education Watch:

“A report released last fall by Iowa’s Attorney General Tom Miller demonstrates how ISL officials carried out this strategy. According to the report, the agency’s leaders pursued a concerted strategy to steer students in the state to its most expensive private student loan products. Among other things, the AG found that ISL had provided kickbacks to colleges that recommended its private “Iowa Partnership Loans” to their students; gave financial rewards to their employees based on the number of private loan borrowers they secured; paid bonuses to staff members at the college access centers they managed based on the number of borrowers they brought in; falsely advertised its private loan products as the “lowest cost” options available; and routinely failed to advise students and their families to exhaust their federal student loan eligibility before taking out private loans.”

Maybe Darrell Issa should take a few days off from Fast and Furious and investigate how a scandal-ridden company got a multi-billion dollar contract with the U.S. government.