So, here’s another one that Barack Obama and His Clueless Minions^™ are allowing to slip through their fingers.

This time, it’s student loan reform, which would have taken the private loan companies out of the game, saved the tax payer money, saved the students money, and eliminated a lot of fraud and waste:

Four months ago, it appeared all but certain that the White House and Democrats in Congress would succeed in overhauling the student loan business and ending government subsidies to private lenders.

President Obama called the idea a “no-brainer” last fall, predicting it would take billions of dollars from the profits of private lenders and give it directly to students, and many colleges were already moving to get loans directly from the federal government in anticipation of the next move by Congress.

But an aggressive lobbying campaign by the nation’s biggest student lenders has now put one of the White House’s signature plans in peril, with lenders using sit-downs with lawmakers, town-hall-style meetings and petition drives to plead their case and stay in business.

Yes, we have reports that the administration has, “recognized the threat and was beginning to push back in an effort to get the plan approved,” as evidenced by the recent criticism of the lobbying and the progress of the bill by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but it is indeed weak tea.

It appears that they dropped the ball on this because they were working on healthcare reform, which might be marginally excusable, only, of course, the administration pretty much screwed the pooch on that one too, handing it off to Congress and allow ratf^%$s like Nelson and Lieberman to screw that up.

Seriously, the problem here is that the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector has captured our government to an astonishing degree, and eventually the parasitic rent taking that they extract from society needs to be reined in.