What is the LLOYD DOBLER EFFECT? Funny you should ask! They're a great new band that was just signed by Universal. Check out their MySpace profile and their website. I heard them the other night and they rocked. Then I discovered that their website links to Rock the Vote, which certainly earns them some promotion here...

A sad day for students. But the battle isn't over yet, it moves back to the House. From Luke Swarthout over at PIRG:

Senate Votes 51-50 for Largest Cuts to Student Aid in History

This morning, the Senate voted 51 to 50, with Vice-President Cheney casting a tie-breaking vote, to cut $12.7 billion out of the student loan programs.  Rather than cutting lender subsidies, the bill takes approximately 70% of its savings from higher loan interest rates for borrowers and redirecting excessive student and parent payments to private lenders.  These cuts are not only the largest in the history of the student loan program, but also the largest single cut in the budget reconciliation package.  This budget bill will make student and families pay more for their loans so that Congress can direct new tax cuts to some of the wealthiest Americans.

Before the vote, Senator Conrad used a procedural maneuver to strip two non-germane provisions out of the bill.  As a result the newly amended reconciliation bill must return to the House to be approved.  Members of the House will now be able to reconsider their votes from early Monday morning, made mere hours after the final bill was introduced.  In the coming weeks, students will continue to make the case to Congress that they should stop this raid on student aid.

From the State PIRG's Higher Education Project:

Senate Voting Wednesday Morning on $12.7 Billion in Student Loan Cuts

Largest Cuts to Student Aid in History

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the budget reconciliation conference report Wednesday morning.  The House voted early Monday morning to pass reconciliation by a vote of 212 to 206.  The budget bill includes $12.7 billion in cuts to the student loan program, both the largest cut in the history of the loan programs and the largest single cut in the legislation.  The bill derives approximately 70% of its savings from higher loan interest rates for borrowers and redirecting excessive student and parent payments to private lenders.  While Congress directs several billion dollars to pay for grant aid and some student borrower benefits, the bulk of the cuts will be sent out of the program to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. 

The bill generates at least 70% of its savings by making loans more expensive for borrowers: approximately $15 billion out of the $21 billion in total cuts.  Specifically the bill generates:

* Almost $13 billion from excessive subsidy payments that student and parent borrowers make to lenders.  This bill uses this money to pay for new tax cuts rather than sending it back to students through additional need-based grant aid or lower interest rates. 

* Approximately $2 billion by increasing the parent loan interest rate from 7.9% to 8.5%. 

Two other cuts that won’t necessarily come from students but could have a significant impact on borrowers are: 

* $2.2 billion in cuts to critical student loan delivery funds used to administer the federal student aid programs.  Without these funds the administration of the federal student aid programs is in jeopardy.

* $1.4 billion by charging guarantee agencies collect a 1% insurance fee on all loans.  Lenders could potentially pass on this cut directly to student borrowers.
 
The hit on students and parents are part of a larger package of more than $40 billion in cuts to federal programs like student loans, Medicaid and food stamps. A corresponding package of $50 to $70 billion in new tax cuts for some of the wealthiest Americans will be voted on early in 2006. 

The budget measure will direct a small portion of the student loan cuts back to students.  The bill spends $3.7 billion on grants for students majoring in math, science and foreign languages.  In addition, the bill will gradually lower charges for some students, known as origination fees, over the next five years.  Finally the bill retains 6.8% as the cap on student interest rates, a measure that will help protect students as interest rates continue to rise. 

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Can you Rock the Vote? The Pew Charitable Trusts and George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management are holding a competition and encouraging non-partisan groups to submit innovative proposals for mobilizing young voters for the '06 elections. There will be at least 10 prizes of up to $250,000 awarded, as well as significant strategic, media, and polling support provided to the winners as they put their plans into action over the course of the next year. For more information on the RFP, go to www.youngvoterstrategies.com

"And they keep telling me I'm free...": Thanks to the ACLU, as reported by the New York Times, we now know that "Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show."

Don't even try it.

TEHRAN, Iran - Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ban on Western music fell on deaf ears Tuesday, as shop owners and music enthusiasts in the Iranian capital continued selling, buying and listening to everything from hip-hop to country rock.

Read the rest of the AP story here, with thanks to CNN's morning grind for pointing it out.

Update on Congress' "Raid on Student Aid": read the story from the Washington Post about the late-night session. According to the publication Inside Higher Education, "As Congress scrambled over the weekend to try to wrap up its work before adjourning for the year, lawmakers acted on several measures potentially important to higher education - with mostly dreadful results for colleges and students." Learn up and tell your friends all about it.

New report summarizes youth vote surge in 2004. From CIRCLE:

CIRCLE released a guide to the 2004 youth vote that pulls together recent and historical data to further document the surge in youth participation. The guide summarizes data about youth voting in the 2004 election based on gender, race, and educational background and provides information on youth support for candidates, political party identification, and state-specific turn-out.

Here's a link directly to the PDF report.

Keeping up the fight on student loans: Students across the country are making calls to their representatives to demand that this Congress stop raiding student aid to pay for other priorities. Word has it that Senator Gordon Smith's answering machine is full in Oregon...

The latest update is that the House and Senate members who will decide the final "compromise" package of cuts to student aid will meet on Monday or Tuesday---the compromise being between a very large set of cuts and a smaller set of cuts. But it is cuts either way, unless the whole thing is stopped.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun editorializes against the cuts today:

Who isn't aware by now that the cost of attending American four-year colleges has been soaring far beyond the rate of growth in U.S. family incomes, and that more and more students are having to take out loans to get by?

About half of all student aid now comes as loans, and students are leaving college with an average of more than $17,000 in debt to repay. In addition, about three-quarters of college students report relying on credit cards to pay for food, books and other school expenses. As a result, 39 percent of all college graduates leave school saddled with a level of loans and other debts considered unmanageable.

And now Congress is poised to help make that average debt total leap higher. Among the House's proposed spending cuts is $14.3 billion from federal student loan programs over the next five years. These cuts won't decrease the number of loans but would raise student borrowing costs by almost $9 billion - or an estimated $5,000 per student, according to the U.S. Student Association. The best hope for college students offered by Congress is not that much better: the Senate's competing proposal of $8.5 billion in student loan cuts through 2010.

So keep up the good fight! We're stalling them, and that can only help.

Could our schools do more to get young people engaged? Surely the answer has to be Yes. I'm still annoyed that I had to learn about a "pocket veto" in high school while learning little about how social change really happens (with apologies to my government teacher whom I adored).

Well, Hamid Shirvani, president of Cal State Stanislaus, has some ideas:

The answers are many. The solutions few. But one essential element is clear -- public education has failed to prepare our young people for civic life.

Read his article in the Modest Bee here... and then write your own for your paper!

Protest student loan cuts: The bad bill that is moving through Congress is now at the stage where the House has to reconcile its horrific proposed cuts with the Senate's proposed cuts. That means we will have time to shoot the whole thing down.

Here's what some students are doing in Texas to shine the light on this disaster. As the article notes:

On Nov. 18, the House passed a bill that would reduce spending by $50 billion, with $14.3 billion of that coming out of higher education. The Senate bill, passed earlier last month, cuts college loan programs by $9 billion and overall spending by $35 billion. Senate and House members are negotiating a compromise and could approve a bill by the Christmas holidays.

You can do something about it: everything you need to take action is HERE at Student Aid Action.

Making an imPACT!: This has to be one of the more exciting stories I have read in a while. A group in Chicago called PACT is organizing young activists and bringing in the politicians to exchange views. This past weekend they got nearly 1000 (!!!) young people together in a room and heard pitches from the Governor of Illinois and his opponent in the upcoming election. The candidates outdid themselves trying to appeal to young voter interests.

Among its many issue oriented initiatives, "PACT is supporting a House bill that would make insurance companies extend health coverage of young adults in family plans to age 25."

As you know, Rock the Vote has been pushing for this health care reform to help young aduluts since the beginning of the 2004 election. Its great to see other groups fighting in the same cause.

Rock on!

"Robbing Joe College to Pay Sallie Mae": Anya Kamanetz has an op-ed in the New York Times today about our "broken" higher education funding system.

THE higher education financing system in this country, like the health care system, is broken. In both cases, costs spiral out of control while millions of people, especially the poor, are not served. And in both cases, a few corporations are making hefty profits.

From the 1950's to the 1970's, college attendance grew along with federal student grant aid. Then, as tuition mushroomed and loans replaced grants, educational attainment stagnated. Today, those lucky enough to graduate from college end up with an average of $17,600 in loans, a burden that shapes decisions like buying a house or having children.

But most young people are not so lucky - half of those who start college do not graduate at all, in part because of the financial burden of staying in school. As a result, Americans aged 25 to 34 are less educated than 45- to 54-year-olds - and more to the point, less educated on average than the citizens of several other industrialized nations.

Nice job, Anya.

Cutting out the heart. This may sound like "inside baseball," but its a critically important story about voting rights, and its something you should know about.

As you may know, the Justice Department oversees many aspects of our voting rights. In order to protect minorities in states with a history of voter disenfranchisement, for example, the Justice Department has to certify local election law changes that might have a negative impact on minority voting rights.

As we know from the student voting rights issue, legislators don't always want to make it easier for certain people to vote. So the idea with the Justice Department certification is to have a process in place so that experts can make decisions without a political agenda.

Well, that is about to change. The Justice Department is about to cut the heart out of the expert review process by preventing Justice Department employees from making recommendations on voting rights issues, so that the political agenda types who get appointed by the Administration can make every decision unimpeded.

According to the Washington Post, "Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases."

So, instead of over-ruling the expert recommendations, which draws public scrutiny, they want to simply prevent the experts from making recommendations at all.

A good article from Illinois about how young people are getting more engaged in politics, with a good quote from Dave Rosenfeld at New Voters Project: “In general, young people are increasingly becoming a political force,” said Rosenfeld. “This is a generation coming into it’s own politically.”

Also, an article from the UK reviewing the state of hip-hop and politics. The article notes "Rap the Vote" which is a project of Rock the Vote, and has actually been an ongoing effort since shortly after Rock the Vote was founded in 1990. Russell Simmons was Chairman of Rap the Vote in 2002, and then started the Hip Hop Summit Action Network; a great partner to Rock the Vote.

"But does she vote?" A great article about Jake Gyllenhaal, which mentions his involvement with Rock the Vote:

A keen environmentalist, he also campaigned on behalf of Rock The Vote to attempt to inspire his peers to vote in the 2004 presidential elections. Admitting he also wants free health care in his country, he’s cautious about standing on his soapbox for too long. “It frustrates me when actors talk politics,” he says. “I’m political and I make choices in my movies that I think are political. I try and say things with what I do. Rightly or wrongly, young actors have all the power.”

Jake conceived and produced his own PSA for Rock the Vote last year---check it out in our media section.

"They fight and they vote." A good story in today's Washington Post about how in 2004 the government made a concerted effort to improve voter access for the troops, with considerable success:

The 2004 participation rate reflected an increase of 10 percentage points from 2000 and was far higher than last year's rate for the general public, which was 64 percent.

This goes to show that when the government wants you to vote, it can do a lot about it. The recent Carter-Baker Commission called for making the government responsible to register everyone to vote, which Rock the Vote strongly endorses. Read what FairVote has to say about it.

Making it harder for you and your friends: The LA Times has a great editorial today calling Congress to task for the recent vote in the House of Representatives for an unprecedented cut in student aid.

Here's an excerpt:

The House last month voted to slash funding for federal student loan programs by $14.3 billion, reversing decades of expansion that have helped open the country's most expensive universities to poor and middle-class students. The House's cuts would add about $5,800 to the average $17,500 student loan debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The cuts couldn't come at a worse time. According to the nonprofit College Board, average tuition and fees at public universities have surged 40% over the last five years. The median family income has crept up just 16% over that period. And early this year, the U.S. Department of Education tweaked its eligibility formula for Pell Grants, an assistance program for low-income students. That eliminated aid to more than 80,000 students and reduced awards to about 1.5 million others.

The piece then talks about how the House and the Senate will have to reconcile their two different versions, referring to the Senate version as not good but the "lesser evil."

The conclusion of the editorial: "If the House has its way, this Congress could be remembered as the one that priced middle-class families out of college."

The Battle for Social Security: As you know, the fight to protect Social Security for young people has been a big focus for us this year. If you are interested in the topic, we have a book for you, "The Battle for Social Security," by Nancy Altman.

Its packed with good history but its a lively read. It also includes a set of policy changes at the end that would fix Social Security in a much better way than some of the so-called privatization plans that have been floating around Washington, DC.

You can read the first chapter online, too...

Do you have health insurance? You should. MTV/Think has a great piece explaining nuts-and-bolts of health insurance and how you can get it even if you don't have it.

Read Rock the Vote's own section for more info on the health care crisis that affects young people and what you can do about it, too.

Continuing controversies about student voting rights. The recent election in Virginia featured a continuation of the problems we have seen in that state regarding student voting rights. In some local jurisdictions, election officials apply their ambiguous state laws in a discriminatory manner against students, saying, for example, that any student who lives in a dorm is not legally allowed to register to vote from that address, whereas a student who lives off campus may vote.

And of course there is always the bogus threat the registering to vote will cost you your health insurance eligibility or affect your parents' income taxes... Not true!!

The Voice of America? The Voice of America, a news service that broadcasts stories about the U.S. to people across the world, recently did a special feature on the power of young people and particularly young voters. There's a short clip featuring Rock the Vote there which you can read or watch on your screen.

Should public school students have a vote on the school board? Its a question that students across the country are putting to the test by pushing for a seat on the local school board and, in some cases, voting rights with that seat. What do you think?

Google search "student on the school board" to find lots of stories about this.

Movin' on up. Congrads on a promotion to Michele Anthony, Rock the Vote board member.

Youth Service America & Youth Venture: funding youth-led and designed organizations, clubs, or businesses
Deadline: December 19, 2005

Youth Service America (YSA) and Youth Venture are teaming up to make every day National & Global Youth Service Day. YSA and Youth Venture are looking for young people who are creating sustainable National Youth Service Day projects to engage in community service and to make a difference in their world for National Youth Service Day 2006. Youth (ages 12-20) who are interested in creating new, sustainable, and civic-minded organizations, clubs, or businesses ("Ventures"). These Ventures must be youth-led and designed to be a lasting asset to the community. Youth Venture is a movement of young people who are changing their communities through youth social entrepreneurship. For more information visit: www.youthventure.org.

You talkin' to me?...

Four of Five U.S. Part-Timers Lack Employer Health Insurance
By Kelly Proctor
Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Four of every five part-time workers in the U.S. lack employer-sponsored health insurance, a study released today reports.

By comparison, about one of every four full-time employees is without such insurance, according to the study conducted by the Iowa Policy Project, a nonprofit public policy research group in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

The study analyzed insurance coverage for ``nonstandard'' employees, such as part-time, temporary or contract workers. About 34.3 million Americans, or 25 percent of the nation's workforce, fall into that category, according to the study.

The research ``demonstrates the weakness in our health insurance system'' for a ``vulnerable group of workers,'' said Sara Collins, a senior program officer with the Commonwealth Fund, a New York nonprofit group that financed the research.

The study, based on 2001 census data and telephone surveys by the researchers in 2003 and 2004, found 21 percent of nonstandard employees had health insurance through their jobs, compared with 74 percent of full-time workers.

Read the rest of the article here. There's lots more on this general topic at UC Berkeley's labor center website. Also, you can read a piece that I co-authored with Helene Jorgensen called "Permatemps" in The American Prospect.