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Sallie Mae-Westwood Diploma Mill Federal Student Loan Fraud #1

Kick #1 (Office of Inspector Blended / Department of Education) "Anyone suspecting guile, waste or abuse involving Bailiwick of ...

The Prince and the Pauper

Prince William, the somewhat dull, not-too-bright, dangerously inbred eldest son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was made an honorary barrister recently, one of the perks associated with being second in line for the throne of Great Britain. A “barrister” is what Americans call a lawyer, and William manages to achieve this without having spent a single day in law school. They just sort of handed it to him.

Well, not exactly.

Tradition dictates that he has to “describe his hobbies and passions” in order to be “called to the bench” by the governing body of the “Ancient Inns of Court”. Sounds like one of the rutuals of the Bohemian Club .

William did his best to fulfill that obligation just the other day.

“I play football, rugby and water polo, not very well, but particularly pride myself in being a quite magnificent armchair center-back at football and flanker at rugby. And now you have made me a barrister – I promise not to practice, except for the odd speeding ticket”, the pampered prince told the crowd of nearly 300 well-wishers.

Well at least he’s leading a life of service to his people. We’re sure he’ll make a magnificent king some day. Whatever were Franklin, Jefferson and Washington thinking when they denied our country the leadership of a family of spoiled, dim-witted brats with too much money and too much time on their hands?

Of course, we do have the Bushes.

We wonder how Robert Bowman might feel about Prince William being handed on a silver platter something Bowman has been struggling to attain his entire adult life.

Our news partners over at the New York Times tell us that Bowman, 47, spent 26 years working himself through community college, graduate school, and law school. He took the New York bar exam 4 times before he finally passed early in 2008. When he applied for admission to the bar, the panel of lawyers who review the applicants and make recommendations called his persistence in the face of all his challenges “remarkable”, and they recommended that he be admitted.

But the group of five state appellate judges, a bunch of old farts without a heart among them, ruled this past spring that Bowman’s student loans were too big, and that he hadn’t made sufficient effort to repay them. So they denied his application.

“Applicant has not made any substantial payments on the loans. Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law” .

Character and fitness?

Bowman admits that he’s not yet attempted to repay his loans, largely because of medical deferments he’s received, and because of complications with his lender, Sallie Mae. But not everyone who has student loans is a deadbeat, and that doesn’t seem to be the case with Bowman.

He spent most of his childhood shuttling between various foster families. As a result of this, he was exposed to a lot of legal proceedings as a child, and felt a pull toward the legal profession.

He spent 10 years getting his undergraduate degree, because for six of those years, he was in rehab, learning to walk again after an ATV hit him while he was stopped in traffic on his motorcycle, very nearly severing his leg. He finally got his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York in 1995. In 2000, he entered the University of California in San Francisco to attend its Hastings College of Law. He graduated in December of 2004, having by this time racked up a debt of $230,000 in student loans. But with the help of his girlfriend who agreed to support him, he set about studying for the bar exam.

Two years ago, Bowman contacted Sallie Mae asking for an accounting of his loans to see where he stood, and he requested information as to what his options for repayment were. According to Bowman, they didn’t respond to his repeated requests for two years. Sallie Mae denies this; in fact, they claim to have been trying to reach Bowman throughout 2007.

After he passed the bar exam last year, he went to Florida to live with his formerly-estranged mother. It was during this period that a Jet Ski lost control and hit him while he was swimming at a beach. This accident broke his other leg, the good one, in four places. He contacted Sallie Mae asking for another medical deferment, but they told him go pound salt.

Taking advantage of having finally tracked him down though, Sallie Mae turned his $230,000 loan over to a federal collection agency which started attaching on fees and penalties. They attached one 25% fee before transferring it to yet another collection agency which attached another 25% fee of its own, and before you know it, Bowman was staring down the barrels of a $400,000 student loan debt.

It was this amount that shocked the sensibilities of the judges who rejected his application to the bar, and the fact that Bowman hadn’t made any payments against it shocked them even further.

The panel of lawyers who recommended Bowman to the judges for admission knew about the loan situation, and knew about Bowman’s history. Still, when recommending him, they showed some compassion for what he’d been through (remarkable in and of itself for a group of lawyers), saying “it appears unconscionable that a student loan indebtedness could go from $270,000 to $435,000 in four years”.

But the judges were having not of it.

Bowman, for his part, is trying to get the court to reverse its decision, and he’s also bring suit against Sallie Mae. Of course, he’ll have to hire a lawyer for that since he isn’t one himself.

And then there is the obvious question, how do the judges expect Bowman to pay back his debt if they deny him the opportunity to practice law? We’re entering Joseph Heller territory here.

Here at OMT, we think that there’s something inherently nauseating about some child of privilege, like Prince William, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a silver thermometer up his ass, getting something for nothing while some guy who’s never seemed to get a break in his life (apart from his legs), but who has worked through his troubles, putting in the effort, doing his homework, and still getting screwed by both circumstance as well as the system, ends up being denied the very thing that the Prince gets just because of an accident of birth.

Prince William’s being given something that he obviously has no appreciation for (“I promise not to practice, except for the odd speeding ticket”) makes a mockery of the effort and hardship that Robert Bowman has gone through in what turns out to be a fruitless pursuit of his dream.

We wish Bowman the best of luck in getting the judges to have a change of heart.

And we hope that Britain gets its head out of its ass and abolishes the monarchy before this spoiled, worthless shit has the chance to ascend to the throne.

Boy can I commiserate with Robert Bowman. I know how he feels. The harder you try (I feel) the harder they kick you in the face, then kick sand in your face while you’re down.

And Fat Eddie Rendell should be able to commiserate with Prince William. Eddie has a job in which the only thing he’s done with it is raise taxes 51% and pad his own retirement account.

It’s a shame how hard working people keep getting crushed under the thumb of bureaucracy. I mean, look at Obama’s health care joke. Everyone HAS to contribute to it or you get a penalty. I thought this was the land of the free. I’m guessing fleecing the American people has become a staple of government no matter what your party is.

Source: One Man's Tofu