Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions^™ are looking at bailing out private student loan issuers with TARP money:

Student advocacy groups are urging the Treasury Department to prevent a new $200 billion consumer-lending program from benefiting private student lenders, which they say are largely unregulated and prey on students with risky, high-interest loans.

The program, announced this week and developed by the Treasury and Federal Reserve, is not aimed specifically at the student loan market. Its much broader goal is to encourage lending to consumers — including car loans, credit card debt and student loans — as well as help the financial system by increasing liquidity in the credit markets.

But groups including Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine, and the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers say the money will also help prop up private student-loan providers, which often offer high and variable interest rates but not the consumer protections guaranteed under the federal government’s loan programs.

These people are sleaze merchants, and they victimize the students in question and the taxpayers, in addition to having been caught bribing school financial aid officials.

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest lending company, has offered private loans with an average interest rate of 11 to 13 percent, nearly twice as much as federal loans, according to Student Lending Analytics, a California-based firm that advises financial aid offices. It said Sallie Mae, which is based in Reston and controlled 42.5 percent of the private student loan market last year, has offered some private loan variable rates that are more than 17 percent.

Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, said the average rate now is between 10 and 11 percent, around what most banks are charging for private student loans, which are not subsidized and government-guaranteed like federal loans. “The comparison to federal student loan rates is unfair and artificial,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The comparison should be to borrowing on a credit card or other unsecured loans.”

Only, of course, these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, and they are guaranteed by taxpayers, so they are completely different from credit card loans.

Can you imagine an industry so f$#%ed up that it compares itself to the credit card industry in regards to how ethically it treats its customers?

Well, you don’t have to, because reality has met you, and smacked you in the face with a rancid halibut.