Obama Awards Contract to Student Loan Predators Who Swindled 60,000 Veteran Families

Sallie Mae has a long, dirty history (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) of preying on those dependent upon student loans for a college education.  Recently, the dirty bastards spun off a company, which according to Forbes, is really the old, rotten version of Sallie Mae that we have come to hate:

The new company which is being spun out – Navient – is equivalent to the old Sallie Mae. It will continue to service the existing loans in the Sallie Mae portfolio, as well as service new loans via contracts with the Department of Education. It will also focus on servicing private student loans, as well as asset recovery (or getting students to pay something, or handle wage garnishments or other ways to recover old loans). 

In May of this year, Sallie and its new spin-off had to pay $139 million for stealing money from veterans.

Now Team Obama has decided to double down with its business philosophy of "why fix something that is already broken" with more money to keep the billionaires happy.

You can read the whole sordid story here at HuffPo:

The Obama administration plans to reward Navient Corp, the student loan specialist formerly owned by Sallie Mae, with new business some three months after federal prosecutors accused the company of intentionally cheating troops on their federal student loans, according to three sources familiar with the administration's plans.

The move is likely to stoke comparisons to recent multi-billion-dollar settlements reached between big banks and federal authorities over financial crisis-era misdeeds. Banks agreed to pay sizable sums, but public interest groups have criticized the settlements because the banks suffered few business consequences and their executives escaped criminal and civil charges.

"It's very disappointing," said Jason Collette, national organizer for Alliance For A Just Society, a network of state-based advocacy groups. "Until a company loses its federal contracts or a senior executive is punished, these fines are just the cost of doing business." . . .