As the richest presidential cabinet member in American history, Betsy DeVos is estimated to be worth well over $5 billion dollars; as Secretary of Education, she denied federal debt relief to thousands of defrauded students.
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00:00Nós estamos a ouvir de uma de Donald Trump's mais controversia do Cabinete Picks,
00:07a Secretaria de Educación, Betsy DeVos.
00:10Quando Betsy DeVos é nominado para Secretaria de Educación e a conferência de conferência,
00:14ela se torna um ponto de ralho.
00:17Isso não vai ser um pique-nico para ela.
00:19Não, não at all.
00:21Obrigada por ter oportunidade de aparecer antes de você.
00:24Eu espero responder suas perguntas.
00:26Betsy DeVos sabe que ela vai ser pillorada.
00:29Ela sabe que ela não vai ser a verdadeira favorita.
00:33E ela vai passar com a conferência de conferência.
00:35Você nunca assistiu a publicidade, a K-12 school, did você?
00:38Correct.
00:39E seus filhos não também, certo?
00:41E você nunca assistiu a K-12 publicidade, certo?
00:43Não, mas eu mentorei em uma.
00:45Ela vive uma vida de privilégio onde há muito poucas pessoas que iriam desafiar ela em qualquer maneira significativa.
00:52Isso acontece nas conferências de conferência.
00:54Você acha que se você não é multibillionaire,
00:57se você, a família, não fez milhões de milhões de contribuições,
01:01a república que você seria aqui hoje?
01:04E ela não vai sidetrack ela.
01:05Senador, a questão de fato, eu acho que há essa possibilidade.
01:09Então, quando a gente pensa em bilionários em política,
01:12a gente pensa em fazer coisas para as próprias próprias interesses.
01:17Betsy DeVos has sido sworn in as the new education secretary
01:21after Vice President Mike Pence made history by being the deciding vote.
01:26Com a família de DeVos,
01:27they are focused on building out this sense of a kingdom of heaven on earth,
01:32that they're doing their work on behalf of God.
01:35When you think about things in a biblical mindset,
01:39you have eternity, essentially, as your battlefield.
01:42The other team is trying to win this cycle.
01:45You are trying to win eternity.
01:48It's day one for me,
01:50but it's simply the next day in this department's history
01:53to pursue its mission.
01:55I'm ready to work with you.
01:57Let's get started.
01:58Let's get started.
02:28Let's get started.
02:58Why have you become, people say, the most hated cabinet secretary?
03:21I'm not so sure how exactly that happened,
03:24but I think there are a lot of really powerful forces allied against change.
03:33Does it hurt?
03:34Sometimes it does.
03:37Betsy DeVos' first visit to a school since her confirmation earlier this week
03:42didn't go as planned.
03:43Once we had a Betsy DeVos as secretary of education,
03:47it was like a hostile takeover of the education system.
03:53And here's a look at demonstrators blocking secretary DeVos from driving up to that school.
03:57I look forward to many visits of many great public schools,
04:02both in D.C. and across the country.
04:06Thanks very much.
04:07What do you think of the protesters this morning?
04:09What do you think of the school?
04:11The school is awesome.
04:13Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
04:16Shame!
04:17I used to say Betsy DeVos never saw a public school that she wanted to help or support.
04:24At the same time, working together is really important.
04:28I believe you're going on a tour of local schools with Randy.
04:31We've agreed to visit schools together.
04:34I will visit a school that she selects, a traditional public school,
04:37and she will visit a choice school.
04:39So I look forward to that opportunity.
04:41We brought her to Van Wert, Ohio, you know, which was a district that voted for Donald Trump.
04:47I thought it would be a district where she'd feel comfortable.
04:50All she really wanted was the public photo op.
04:56I'll never forget, they wanted me to plant a tree with her.
05:00And I said, look, trust is earned.
05:02Protesters were outside the arts center here.
05:04They said in a rural county like Van Wert,
05:06school choice takes money away from areas with no or very few private and charter schools.
05:13I found Betsy DeVos very wooden and very animated by whatever her belief systems are.
05:22It's about 20% of the students from this area that are electing to go to schools
05:26other than the Van Wert public school system.
05:30People play lots of politics in and around public education.
05:34And there are some people like the Betsy DeVos types who spend their lives trying to destabilize it.
05:41Government is generally not the solution to any problem.
05:45It's generally the problem.
05:48She believes in the purest ways of markets and capitalism and, frankly, the survival of the fittest.
05:58If you have healthy competition and you have a quality product to offer,
06:04you're going to attract people to what you have to offer.
06:07And if you don't, you're going to have to either adjust or go away.
06:12If you're one of the richest people in America, it's pretty easy to believe in survival of the fittest.
06:17That's just, you know, that's what happens in the rest of life.
06:20And I think that's what should be the reality in the education marketplace as well.
06:26Public education is about how we lift everyone.
06:30Part of what we do is create a ladder of opportunity that everybody can climb up,
06:36not just somebody who's rich who already has that ladder of opportunity.
06:40So if I could have a real conversation with her, which she never wanted to do,
06:45I would really try to find out why.
06:47Why are you operating in a way that hurts the very people that you say that you want to help?
06:55Why are you doing this?
06:56What motivates you to do this?
06:59I don't think any explanation of the DeVosses is complete without understanding where they come from.
07:09I grew up not far from where the DeVosses are from in West Michigan.
07:14They were our Rockefellers, our Carnegies.
07:18Their names are plastered all over museums and hospitals.
07:22We had talked about the DeVosses literally over the dinner table growing up.
07:26Fast forward a number of years, and I'm writing about politics,
07:30and in particular, writing about the influence of money and anonymous money.
07:35I started to see the DeVoss name almost organically in my reporting.
07:41Dick DeVoss, Betsy DeVoss, Richard DeVoss, the patriarch of that whole family.
07:46And that led me down a path to trying to figure out, well, how involved are the DeVosses?
07:51How much money are they spending?
07:53And what is their reason for doing all of this, for pouring all of this money
07:57from their many billions that they have in their wealth into American public life?
08:03Our focus was on how we could enrich the lives of our people and make them better,
08:10oftentimes influencing them with our faith as well.
08:12I think that they believe that they are here to promote the will of God.
08:22They are here to spread the word, along with being here to get as rich as they possibly can.
08:32Rich enough to buy at least seven yachts.
08:36The two go hand in hand.
08:38Making money is a legitimate form of defined creativity.
08:42We have a higher purpose.
08:45We're not just shuffling things from one place to another.
08:48We're participating in a divine act.
08:52West Michigan has this rich tradition, specifically of Dutch Reformed Christianity.
09:02I've heard it described as the sort of epicenter of American Calvinism.
09:06The Calvinists believe that you cannot save your soul through good works,
09:12that God alone decides whose soul is saved or not.
09:15But one thing you can do is express this confidence that you are among the elect.
09:20You are among the souls God has chosen to save.
09:23And the way you do this is by leading a moral life.
09:26Once you see yourself and others as children of a loving creator,
09:32you can begin the journey in the right direction towards compassionate capitalism.
09:37Fundamental Christianity and the unfettered capitalism just mesh for them.
09:44They believe that there is a purpose in their wealth,
09:49and they use their wealth towards advancing what they see as God's kingdom.
09:55Before she was Betsy DeVos, she was Betsy Prince.
09:58The princes were the other wealthy family that loomed so large in West Michigan
10:05and especially in the Dutch Reformed community.
10:09Her father, Edgar Prince, made a fortune in the auto parts business.
10:14I think he's most famous for the lighted sun visor.
10:18Above your head, open it up, little light goes on.
10:21We can thank Edgar Prince for that.
10:22One of the things that was key to his worldview and his wife's worldview
10:26and the worldview that they instilled in their children
10:28was a conservative Christianity that they believed
10:33was being displaced from the public square in many ways.
10:36Her father, Ed Prince, advocated a return to religious schooling
10:40and put his kids through religious schools.
10:43Betsy was always very competitive.
10:45As a kid, she entered things like tulip contests.
10:49She was a competitive swimmer.
10:51She won a local championship.
10:54Betsy coming in first place and her younger sisters coming in third and fifth
10:58or something like that, respectively.
11:00Her brother, Eric Prince, would go on to form the private security company Blackwater.
11:06Eric Prince would have a long future of controversy in front of him in his own right.
11:11But Betsy was the political animal of the family.
11:17Betsy, you tell us how you got involved in Republican politics.
11:20Well, it was really pretty simple.
11:22I was a student in college and our former ambassador
11:26and former committee man from Michigan, Peter Secchia,
11:29got me involved as a college student working on President Ford's election campaign.
11:34And so it was 20 years ago now.
11:35I can't believe it's been that long.
11:38She knew Gerald Ford, literally.
11:40I mean, their families knew one another.
11:42And you have this very 1970s photo of her wearing this T-shirt that just says,
11:47President Ford.
11:48It's a statement of power.
11:49In the late 1970s, the future Betsy DeVos meets a man named Dick DeVos,
11:55whose father is one of the wealthiest people in the state.
11:57Their eyes meet across the room at a gathering and is immediately sort of attracted to Betsy.
12:05I think at the time, the DeVos' were one of the richest families in Michigan, multi-billionaires.
12:12He woos her.
12:13She was accustomed to living a life without much want.
12:17He's accustomed to something similar.
12:19But the wealth that his family has is several magnitudes higher than the wealth that the Prince family has.
12:25I always think of it as like, in feudal times, you know, two very powerful families becoming even more powerful by merging.
12:34You know, that in a way is what happened when Dick and Betsy got together.
12:39Betsy and Dick have always been this great partnership.
12:43Evil!
12:43Evil!
12:45Evil!
12:46Fuck off!
12:47They don't really care about your mockery because they are doing this for, in their mind, quite literally, a higher cause.
12:55In 1985, five people engaged in philanthropy came together for the first time with a very simple agenda.
13:04To have a conversation with like-minded friends and spiritual encouragers.
13:08So, at the gathering in 2001, I believe it was, Betsy and her husband, Dick DeVos, spoke about why they are focusing the resources at that time on education reform.
13:20We're very strong proponents of fundamentally changing the way we approach education.
13:27And she talks about seeing education reform and seeing schools as literally a biblical battleground.
13:35She likens it to this famous battleground where the Israelites fought against the Philistines.
13:40A couple of years ago, we went on a trip to Israel, where the coastal plain, where the pagans lived, and the Israelites lived in the foothills.
13:47And the crescent in between was called the Shephelah.
13:51And what Betsy DeVos says is just this very clear recitation of how she sees the world.
13:57You know, our desire is to confront the culture in which we all live today by changing the system of education in the country in ways which will continue to help advance God's kingdom.
14:09When you have this biblical belief in what you think is right, then it kind of pushes you to go all in.
14:17More than half of our giving ultimately is in some way involved with education, which may have greater kingdom gain in the long run than just the traditional funding the Christian organization route.
14:30It pushes you further than perhaps you might otherwise go because you see this real true moral stake in any political fight.
14:39Have you ever asked yourself what will be written on your tombstone?
14:45When you reach out to help this planet or the people on the planet, when you do good for others, it's really for your own good.
14:53It's hard to know where to start when thinking about the DeVos' influence, especially in Republican politics.
14:58If I had to trace it back in time, I would say it lines up with the rise of Amway.
15:04Hi, you've seen us in Amway commercials and perhaps you thought, well, they're just actors.
15:09We are, but we're also earning extra income as Amway distributors.
15:13Amway distributors offer home care products, food supplements, housewares and personal care items to our friends and neighbors.
15:20And friends recommend others.
15:22As an Amway distributor, you simply build your business as large as you want to reach your idea of success.
15:27From the beginning, Amway was infused with the way that Rich DeVos saw the world.
15:35Some of you, right here this weekend, you're going to leave this weekend and for the first time in your life, you're going to say and realize,
15:43I've got wings, I can fly, I am a winner, I'm going to do it because I am freedom in America.
15:51Faith merged with free enterprise, that is the DNA of Amway and it's there from the very beginning.
15:58And they have come to see Amway as a carrier for this idea.
16:05In the 1970s, the FTC was scrutinizing Amway specifically to understand what was Amway's business model and was that model a pyramid scheme.
16:15And while the FTC had come to the conclusion that Amway is not a pyramid because the money in Amway comes from selling real products,
16:22The FTC did say that Amway misrepresented the kind of money that could be made by the average distributor.
16:30This experience opens Rich DeVos' eyes to the importance of having some influence in Washington
16:37and making sure that government didn't come after this company that he had built.
16:42Once that battle is won, Rich DeVos does not shrink away from politics.
16:48He stays very much involved and in fact becomes more prominent, especially in the Republican Party.
16:54The president's aide said he'd long wanted to appear before a supportive group outside of Washington soon after his State of the Union address.
17:03To those who say we must turn back to tax and tax and spend and spend, I can only reply, not on your life.
17:10The event at Atlanta's Omni Coliseum concerns some White House aides because its chief sponsor was the Amway Corporation,
17:19a multi-million dollar enterprise of door-to-door salesmen which has had some legal problems of late.
17:25Rich DeVos becomes really a sought-after fundraiser, a donor, someone with an extensive network of people at his disposal
17:34who can donate to Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980, who can donate to congressional campaigns up and down the ballot,
17:43candidates for office in Michigan, candidates for office in other states around the country.
17:47Now the Republicans have come up with something new.
17:49They're taking the show on the road, going after the little guy, and in the process changing the party's fat cat image.
17:55These are the little guys, 8,000 Texas Republican shareholders.
18:01For $25 apiece, they got a big show and a sales pitch.
18:04Here comes the commercial.
18:07We need more people who give $25 a year to sustain this organization.
18:12Then each $25 shareholder turned in the names of three friends.
18:17This is the new way of passing the collection plate in politics, and it's followed by a sermon.
18:21A God in heaven who knows me and loves me and calls me by my name.
18:27That out of achievement comes abundance, and out of abundance comes the means.
18:32This guy couldn't be more of a dream if you're any future Republican presidential candidate from there.
18:38We would like to welcome you here this evening.
18:40What Amway also allowed the DeVosses to do was to convey to this army of thousands and thousands of salespeople around the country that they needed to get involved in politics.
18:52This is our country, and we want it back.
18:55Come on, let's get it back!
18:57And that politics and government could directly impact their business, their livelihood.
19:02You saw this not just with the Amway caucus, actual salespeople from the company who got elected to the House of Representatives,
19:11but in the number of Amway salespeople who donated to candidates, who volunteered for congressional campaigns, who became politically active.
19:21I think for those people who give $10, they've got to have as much joy as if I give $100,000 or whatever.
19:27In 1994, Amway makes a $2.5 million donation to the Republican Party.
19:34At that time, that is the largest corporate donation to a party in history.
19:39Fast forward a couple of years, in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives,
19:44a last-minute tax break has slipped into one of these must-pass budget bills.
19:49And they gave Amway $200 million in tax deductions for their Republican contributions.
19:57Now, if you think about that as a return on investment for that $2.5 million a few years earlier, that's a pretty darn good investment.
20:05President Bush is here today, too.
20:07Oh, yeah, I got it.
20:07What's President Bush doing there?
20:08What's he doing there?
20:09He's here for an Amway convention.
20:11Amway convention.
20:12Amway, the home products.
20:14Does it seem right to you that a former president is selling soap?
20:17Does it seem about right to you?
20:19After that tax break is passed into law, Betsy DeVos writes an op-ed and roll call where she basically comes out and admits it.
20:27Says the quiet part out loud, as we like to say.
20:30When we give money to members of Congress, we expect something in return.
20:34Oh, I thought, well, geez, at least they're being honest.
20:37You do give money, expect, and results.
20:40And if you don't get results, you're going to find other places to put your money.
20:43Rich DeVos was a mega-donor before we had the language for mega-donors.
20:47Betsy is following in his wake, traveling in the path that he has sort of carved out ahead of her.
20:53Gentlemen, welcome to the 1998 Republican State Convention.
20:58It's natural for her to make a quick ascent.
21:03Across the 1990s and 2000s, you really start to see Betsy step into the political spotlight more.
21:08She does two terms as the head of the Michigan Republican Party.
21:13This is a party of life.
21:14We are a party that supports those that are most, that are least able to defend themselves.
21:20She becomes a Republican National Committee woman, which gives her a seat and a voice in the decisions of the National Republican Party.
21:26We are very excited.
21:28We have two re-elections, Congresswoman Candace Miller and Congressman Mike Rogers.
21:34She is a key fundraiser for congressional races, for Senate races.
21:40She's sought out by candidates all across the country.
21:44Really, she starts to become the most prominent DeVos in the political realm.
21:50I've been through the whole, you know, whole range of things as far as party involvement, from precinct delegate to county chair, district chair, and now state chairman.
22:01Every Republican candidate for president in the last 30 years has known who the DeVos' were, has courted them, has sought them out for their support and for access to their network.
22:12It really goes to show, though, the increasing importance that West Michigan plays in Republican politics in the state.
22:20If you don't know the DeVos' you probably should be in Michigan politics.
22:25I started in politics in 1993.
22:27I probably met the DeVos' sometime in the mid-90s.
22:33They're decent people.
22:35Not everyone's going to agree with them.
22:36Not everyone's going to agree with their methods.
22:38There's a lot of values that we have here locally in rural mid-Michigan.
22:42A lot of things we take pride in.
22:44One is our public schools.
22:45Our education delivery system in America is antiquated, and it is, quite frankly, embarrassing.
22:51So the rhetoric about failing public schools just kind of rubs people the wrong way.
22:58Schools are central to what the DeVos family sees as its mission, which is to create a more God-centered society and to do what they think is morally and biblically right.
23:09And what they want to do in the year 2000 is change the way that schools are funded.
23:16The dollars should follow every single child.
23:19They and their parents should be empowered to make the best choice.
23:23Parents would get a voucher from the state of Michigan and be able to use it to send their kids to religious schools if they want to,
23:30instead of that money just directly going to the public schools in the area where that kid lives.
23:34Students whose families want to have them in religious schools, such as Catholic schools, can actually elect to make that choice.
23:42Reverend Russell Meyer worries it could lead to students being indoctrinated into religions.
23:48No public fund should be used to teach your religion to our children.
23:53School vouchers are on the ballot in Michigan.
23:56Carla Knight and Thomas knows how she'll vote.
23:59I think the vouchers will help. That's a start. We have to start somewhere.
24:04When they have a choice, that's going to drive schools, public schools, charter schools, non-public schools, all of them, to be better, to earn that parent's choice.
24:16Betsy is chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party.
24:18She expects that John Englert, the Republican governor, is going to be with her in this fight.
24:24Not a proposal I would have put on the ballot, and I'd urge the folks to reconsider.
24:28And he warns her that the timing is just wrong on this issue.
24:32It's obvious to me that the governor prefers a follower in the job of chair, not a leader.
24:37And it drives a wedge between her and Englert, and leads to her stepping down as chair of the Republican Party of the state of Michigan,
24:45so that she can devote herself full-time to pursuing this ballot initiative.
24:50I shall return.
24:52Thank you.
24:52And the initiative fails in massive, massive proportions.
24:58But, importantly, they pick themselves up and have the resources to go at it again and again and again.
25:04Are you still trying to decide who to vote for for governor?
25:08Hear me out.
25:09Dick DeVos.
25:10He's turned businesses around, created a lot of jobs, raised four kids.
25:15They turned out great.
25:16Some better than others.
25:18He's done a lot for our community.
25:20A leader all his life.
25:21And he's got an independent streak.
25:23Nobody pulls his chain.
25:26Almost nobody.
25:27I heard that.
25:28So, I'm Melissa DeVos, and I hope you'll vote for my dad.
25:33Dick DeVos decided that perhaps the best way he could bring about the kind of changes in Michigan was to run for governor himself.
25:41The wealthy West Michigan businessman is not well known by many voters.
25:45One in ten voters polled didn't know his name.
25:47He runs for governor in 2006, spends more than $30 million of the family fortune to try to get himself elected.
25:55$35 million is a lot of money.
26:00But when you're a billionaire, it's not all that much.
26:05DeVos' spending blitz helped make this Michigan's most expensive governor's race ever.
26:10But that was not enough to sway voters to send him to Lansing.
26:13I did my best to communicate a message of hope and opportunity for Michigan.
26:18It was heartening to me at the time to see that you could not win an election like that just by spending lots of money.
26:29They got trounced.
26:30They got rejected.
26:32This was a sea change moment for the DeVos'es.
26:36Dick says, if I can't serve in this way, meaning the governorship, then we'll have to find some other way to serve.
26:44Sometimes they're going to win, sometimes they're going to lose, but they're going to fight the fight.
26:48And they're going to continue to do that.
26:49Whereas a lot of people, they may run for mayor, state rep, and lose, and they're done with politics.
26:54Not the DeVos'es.
26:55They're in it.
26:57Who decides what's in the best interests of children?
27:01Their parents or the government?
27:03They helped launch this group, the Great Lakes Education Project, which becomes the tip of the spear for their efforts to elect and defeat politicians who either do or don't align with their agenda on education.
27:21Everybody would equate a GLAP endorsement with a DeVos family endorsement.
27:25And some places, that's key.
27:27That's golden.
27:27The purpose is, they're trying to get elected people that support public education reform.
27:32They're paying for access.
27:33They're paying to get more like-minded individuals under the dome.
27:38Then in 2011, right after the election of Governor Rick Snyder, pro-corporate, sort of avuncular, goofy Republican, they do notch a really important victory.
27:50They helped defeat a cap on charter schools in Michigan.
27:58Charter schools are publicly funded, but independent of traditional local schools.
28:02Under state law, they have to be authorized by local school boards, intermediate school districts, community colleges, or universities.
28:08Lifting that cap meant for-profit companies that operate many charter schools are able to see a massive increase in the amount of money that they potentially can get from the public.
28:21It's important for anybody to have a choice, whether it's public, private, or charter.
28:27Everybody should have a choice in where they feel like their children would do better and succeed it.
28:32There is no overwhelming evidence that the education system in Michigan has benefited or has climbed far above its rank because of this program.
28:44The report card for Michigan schools is in, and some mid-Michigan schools are seeing red.
28:50Michigan falls in the bottom 25% of states based on standardized test scores.
28:54Michigan failed to meet criteria that included dropout and graduation rates.
28:59It was a very intentional strategy to undermine any kind of interest in public education, much less any devotion of funds to public education.
29:14If you think about the DeVos' push for school choice, the main opponent to that is teachers' unions.
29:20More charter schools means it's more likely there'll be more schools without a union presence.
29:25Detroit, birthplace of the production line and the new idea that almost everybody could have a car.
29:32The union movement in the United States traces back to Michigan, where you have the United Autoworkers and the industrial boom in the 20th century.
29:41Show me what democracy looks like!
29:43This is what democracy looks like!
29:46Right to work was not on the docket as something that Rick Snyder, Republican governor, wanted to tackle.
29:53Union workers came by the thousands to the Michigan State Capitol building to protest legislation to ban unions from requiring workers to pay labor dues.
30:03We value the freedom to associate. We need to preserve and protect the right in America to disassociate.
30:10Freedom. Choice. We cherish it.
30:13There's a plan to protect our freedom in Michigan. It's called Freedom to Work.
30:17This has been a coordinated effort from the DeVos family. There were media reports that Mr. DeVos was calling around senators who didn't want to vote for this and pressuring him with primaries, and I suspect he did the same thing with the governor.
30:28If the DeVos's care about it, they have the ability to make it the issue that the state moves on.
30:35The governor held a press conference at 11 o'clock last Thursday. By 3 o'clock, we were voting on a bill that we'd never seen.
30:41The fact that it happens with the speed that it does really shows that the DeVos's, when they want to, are the ones who can set the political agenda for Republicans in the state of Michigan, regardless of whether or not they are the ones in office.
30:53The Republican-dominated state legislature approved laws that deny unions the right to require membership in exchange for a job.
31:01The right to work went from a pipe dream and a complete non-starter to reality.
31:09I would imagine for them, it gave them a playbook of how they can use their wealth, their influence, their connections, to bring about changes to policy and to politics that people thought previously unimaginable.
31:24I knew that the DeVos's weren't big Trump fans at the start of that 2016 campaign, but good Republicans that they are, they fell in line and raised money for Trump once he was the Republican nominee.
31:40I am so excited and humbled to be nominated as Secretary of Education.
31:47Again, return on investment.
31:49To me, it felt like the culmination of her entire life in politics up to that point.
31:56It's time to make education great again in this country.
32:01Trump is a very transactional figure who clearly doesn't have any deeply held belief in conservative Christianity.
32:11God bless you. Thank you.
32:16The DeVos's, that is what they believe in. They believe in it sincerely. And so on one level, it didn't make sense.
32:24The billionaire president has surrounded himself with billionaires.
32:29On another level, it made total sense.
32:32Why can't they have people of modest means?
32:35Because I want people that made a fortune, because now they're negotiating with you.
32:40You can tell in that appointment how little Donald Trump cared about his base.
32:46Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
32:48Hundreds, if not thousands, march today in protest of President Trump's pick for Education Secretary.
32:54She spent her whole life working against public schools.
32:56She's never been through the public schools. Her children have never been through the public schools.
33:00Mrs. DeVos, have you ever taken out a student loan from the federal government to help pay for college?
33:05I have not.
33:06Have any of your children had to borrow money in order to go to college?
33:10They have been fortunate not to.
33:12Uh-huh. Have you had any personal experience with the Pell Grant?
33:15Not personal experience, but certainly friends and students with whom I've worked.
33:22So you have no personal experience with college financial aid or management of higher education?
33:28What was worse, the anti-education theology or the lack of knowledge to actually do this job?
33:37In 2016, it was very clear that her focus and passion was around K-312 and charter schools and private schools.
33:48This means expanding choices and options to give every child the opportunity for a quality education, regardless of their zip code or their family circumstances.
33:58There was this hope that maybe the worst wouldn't befall upon higher ed and student loans.
34:07But nothing could be further from the truth.
34:09Late in the Obama administration, new rules were established to allow student borrowers to have their debt erased
34:15if they'd been victims of fraud by for-profit schools.
34:19But as the new rules were set to take effect this month, the new administration called for a freeze,
34:24with Secretary DeVos saying they were created in a, quote,
34:27muddled process that's unfair to students and schools.
34:30Betsy DeVos decided that these students were going to be essentially left on their own and that the education department was going to in fact bring in executives from for-profit schools to help dictate these policies.
34:45Think about some of the most predatory actors out there, from payday lenders to debt collectors.
34:52I've seen practices at for-profit schools that would make those entities blush.
34:57The jobs of tomorrow are here, thousands of them waiting to be filled.
35:03These are for-profit institutions.
35:05They have a different economic incentive than a public school.
35:09If you want to find out about training for a successful career in photography, motion picture and video...
35:14Many of these are large corporations, some of these are traded on Wall Street.
35:19And at the end of the day, their job is to make money
35:23and to get as many resources back to their shareholders as they can.
35:29Our fashion merchandising students learn photo styling, visual presentation, fashion marketing, buying and much more.
35:35We're selling you that you're going to have a 95% chance that you're going to have a job paying $35,000, $40,000 a year by the time they're done in 18 months.
35:43Is that true?
35:44No, no, we later found out it's not true at all.
35:46Yeah, we later found out.
35:47It wasn't true at all.
35:48It wasn't as if these people had done anything wrong.
35:51They did exactly what our society has told them to do for as long as they can remember.
35:57Take on debt to chase the American train.
36:00DeVry University was sued today by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading consumers.
36:05According to the FTC, DeVry stretched the truth when it advertised just how well its students do after they graduate.
36:11I have been pursuing the claims of student borrowers against the Department of Education across three administrations now.
36:20And it's always been this uphill battle.
36:23My job was so much harder with DeVos because she was reversing progress.
36:32The Education Department is unwinding the unit investigating fraud at for-profit colleges.
36:38It has effectively killed investigations into possible fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges.
36:44She came in with a specific view, and that view was that they were looking for a handout.
36:50There's no question that Carithian borrowers were defrauded.
36:54Do you agree that those loans before July 1st, 2017, are subject to the Borrower Defense Fund?
37:01I understand that some of you here want to just have blanket forgiveness for everyone, anyone who raises their hand and files a claim.
37:07But that simply is not right.
37:09She was there to support that industry. She wasn't there to support student borrowers.
37:14Our process focuses on individual students and requires evidence from both the borrower and the school before deciding a claim.
37:21There are people who have such strong claims, and they haven't been able to get the outcome that the law requires because they don't have power.
37:33I was raised to know my rights, and once I realized that these schools had violated my rights, that's when I started really digging into the research and finding out what had just happened to me.
37:44My name is Teresa Sweet, and I am the named plaintiff in what was formerly known as Sweet v. DeVos and is now known as Sweet v. Cardona.
37:53From a pretty young age, I always kind of dreamed of being a photojournalist.
37:57When I moved to California, I took some classes at community college and, of course, the first class I enrolled in was a photography class.
38:04The instructor for that class pulled me aside one time and said, you know, I really think that you should consider photography as a profession, as a career.
38:11And she told me about a couple of schools. One was Brooks.
38:14And she explained to me that it was a small, privately owned family school that had a really good reputation for strong technical education.
38:21I don't think she knew at the time that the school had been purchased by Career Education Corporation and that there was a very different thing happening at that school than what she was familiar with.
38:32Follow your art to Brooks Institute.
38:35Beautiful promotional materials, excellent photography, beautiful websites.
38:39You know, they had lists of instructors that they had there who had been published in National Geographic and the New York Times and all of the sort of big publications that you really would want to see.
38:52I didn't come from a situation where my family could help me pay for college. I was going to be the first person in my family to graduate from college. So it was a huge deal.
38:59I was really excited and I was learning things and getting, you know, critiques from respected photographers. But near the end of school, that all started to come crashing down.
39:12They made it very clear that our name on your resume will get your foot in the door. We have all of these connections. You most likely will be making $70,000 to $80,000 a year.
39:22You will be able to work right out of college, sometimes even in college. And all of it was a lie. Most of the time when I actually could get myself a meeting or a phone conversation with an established professional photographer,
39:35I would get the same thing that they told many of my friends, which was we would never hire anyone from that school. And so within a month of graduating, I get a statement from my private lender saying that I have a $2,500 payment coming up.
39:48And I mean, what can I do besides laugh? Because I'm like, I don't even make that much money right now.
39:54I would have weekly screaming matches with these people on the phone because I would say I'm offering to pay you every spare penny that I have, but you won't accept what I can pay you.
40:04So what do you want me to do? And they just said, well, we'll put you in economic hardship forbearance. And then, of course, they also don't explain that increases your interest rate.
40:13And the private loans, ultimately, they topped out at about $450,000.
40:19I'm in my mid-40s and I can't rent an apartment on my own. I can't get a car loan. I could never buy a house.
40:25I mean, imagine you start dating someone that you really, really like and you talk about a future together and then you have to say, oh, by the way, I have a half a million dollar debt from a worthless degree that I'm going to have to pay on for the rest of my life.
40:37Are you going to be okay with that? I filed my borrower's defense in 2016. It was the first real light at the end of the tunnel that I actually saw.
40:47How many claims does an employee process in a 40-hour workweek?
40:52That is not a relevant question because we have not been able to process.
40:56How many? It's really, really relevant because you got to have the people to do the work.
41:01This May of 2018, we have not been able to process.
41:04So the backlog and the number of pending claims kept going up and up and up.
41:10And we just knew that nothing was going to change unless we challenged it. And so that's what we did.
41:16When you're looking for a lead plaintiff in a class action, you want somebody who understands that the problem is bigger than them and also really cares that every last one of those people can get the outcome that justice requires.
41:36You know, Teresa had both of those things.
41:38My first thought really honestly was that no way, because then my name is going to be in the newspaper.
41:43People are going to want to talk to me. I'm not, I'm not comfortable with that.
41:47But when they called and started talking, they didn't have to persuade me. Just everything just came out.
41:53It was crying. They were so understanding. And they say, hey, we would like to file the lawsuit in California, in San Francisco. And we think that you're the one.
42:04Teresa Sweet described to lawmakers through tears the impact her student loan debt is taking on her.
42:10It is unlikely that I would ever be able to start a family or get married because I would condemn my family to a lifetime of poverty.
42:17We brought the lawsuit basically to assert that the Department of Education was failing. It was failing to do something it was required to do.
42:25Since graduation, I've never had a job where I use the education I received at Brooks. And I've never had a job that's paid me even income remotely close to what would be necessary to repay those loans.
42:36When it first happened and the first few news articles started coming out, I was getting hundreds of messages. Most very positive. I did get some very negative, threatening messages from people who were big fans of Betsy DeVos for some reason.
42:49She's done a great job so far, even though she's met with all this opposition.
42:53She's bringing attention to a lot of the weaknesses that that have developed in our education system.
42:59You are also facing a lawsuit for overturning an Obama era rule protecting students defrauded by predatory schools.
43:06You know, tens of thousands of students said we have been defrauded. Well, we have put a rule into place that that that will look at whether they have been financially harmed.
43:17Any student that has been defrauded and financially harmed should receive relief.
43:23You know, a lot of people might have thought, well, once she processes it, then of course I'll get justice.
43:27While in the background, Betsy DeVos and her for profit lackeys are changing the rules in the middle of the game.
43:34This administration is committed to pulling back the previous administration's overreach and will enforce a borrower defense rule that is consistent with Congress's intent,
43:44that protects all borrowers and that treats taxpayers and schools fairly.
43:50I suspected that it would take a while, but I didn't think it would be anything like what it turned out to be.
43:55When was the last time the department approved a borrower defense claim?
43:58The department is reviewing and approving the ones for closed loan discharge regularly.
44:04Has the department approved even one borrower defense claim?
44:08I believe so. We're reviewing them regularly.
44:11How many?
44:12I don't have the specific number.
44:13Does any of your staff know how many?
44:14I'd be happy if you'd like to submit a question for the record.
44:16I'd like to know if any of your staff members behind you have an idea of when that, how many have been approved?
44:22Well, okay, apparently not.
44:29We thought we had finally landed on something that was acceptable to all parties and that she would process all the borrower's defense applications on the merits of their claims and do it within a certain time and we would be fine.
44:42Well, then all the mass denial started coming out.
44:45There's a subset of these loans where the person has already gotten an email telling them that their loan is canceled and she signed off on it.
44:54But at the same time, she wrote in the margin with extreme displeasure.
45:00To follow the law, to do what she was supposed to do, caused her extreme displeasure, I think is a beautiful summation of what being secretary of education actually was for her as a person.
45:14Simply discharging all of these loans as some on this committee suggests be done is not fair to taxpayers nor to those who have paid or are paying their loans.
45:25Shame is a really powerful way to keep people quiet.
45:29We are students standing up to for-profit colleges.
45:33People don't want to admit, I don't want to admit that I was in this situation where I'm now nearly half a million dollars in debt and a full grown adult.
45:43Well, those things are hard to say out loud and there's hundreds of thousands of people who are just like me dealing with the same kinds of things.
45:51They say cut back! We say cut back!
45:54As of right now, the lawsuit represents over 170,000 students.
45:59It's upsetting because when you talk about the debt levels that a lot of these students have, it's life altering debt.
46:05You can't take something like this sitting down.
46:07I'm here mostly to address members of the public who are watching because there are things that you all deserve to know about this committee and I feel it's fair that I should scorch a little earth.
46:14It was not easy and there's been a lot of tears, but I think that it's only really, really hard the first time and it gets easier after that.
46:22I have literally had class members who I have never met reach out to me and tell me they were considering suicide because of this inescapable debt. I have to talk strangers off a cliff.
46:33It's hard to accept like I can't help all of those people individually. So this is my way that I do it.
46:39Not only is our due process probably being violated here, but you know, it's ruining people's lives.
46:45Betsy DeVos has taken that fight to not one, but two circuit courts of appeals.
46:52She has hired very expensive lawyers to fight that. And moreover, the Department of Justice is taking her side. They're still defending her.
47:01And I think that that right there just shows that in some ways certain people remain unaccountable.
47:11It's easy for a lot of people to say that it's our fault that it happened, that we should have known better, we should have been smarter.
47:18When in reality, all most of us did was trust our institution of higher learning.
47:24We shouldn't have to sue our government to protect us from fraud.
47:28To be totally fair, there was a student debt crisis before the world really ever knew who Betsy DeVos was.
47:37And I think when she came into office, we were at this very critical moment where we could have made significant reforms that helped millions of people.
47:50But instead, the four years of her tenure were just an unmitigated disaster.
47:59It feels like we're not even back to square one yet. And square one itself wasn't even a great place.
48:06In some senses, I think that Betsy DeVos was really the savior of that industry.
48:12I wonder if there was no one around her to tell her just not only how politically toxic this was, but just how detrimental this was for just real people.
48:27Being as wealthy as someone like Betsy DeVos, I think that they're so far removed from what it is like to actually be a regular work-a-day kind of person.
48:35She might see, oh, $50,000 student loan debt. Well, you know, she can spend that in an afternoon and probably not think about it.
48:44If you have never talked to those people to put yourself in their shoes, then you act like Betsy DeVos did.
48:52I mean, you don't have to do things like write extreme displeasure on this memo. She went out of her way. She almost helped bring attention to what the students were saying and to this issue of for-profit colleges just because she herself was so controversial.
49:14If they wanted to go live on an island and be left alone for the rest of their lives, they could do it.
49:19They choose to champion public education reform. If it wasn't for the DeVos family, the Republican Party would not be where it's at today.
49:29We've never seen anything like this before where protesters have gotten that close to the building.
49:34USA! USA!
49:40Betsy DeVos has resigned after the Capitol insurrection, saying that Trump's rhetoric was inflection point.
49:53I don't imagine the DeVos's are going to disappear anytime soon. They see themselves as fighting this crusade, whether it's going up against organized labor, the Democratic Party, you know, any political opposition, or just the sort of prevailing culture in America.
50:13Her policies, her decisions, they really hurt real people in really tangible ways and in ways that really can't ever be made up.
50:23I think her legacy is that she actually fought to undermine the very institutions that are there to help kids succeed.
50:32She used her office to actually hurt those who were vulnerable and those who needed her help.
50:38You are all such great listeners. Thank you.
50:41Did I miss any pages?
50:44Just a couple, but you caught right up with it. Okay?
50:51Thank you, guys.
50:53Thank you, guys.
51:23Thank you, guys.
51:53Thank you, guys.