Student Loan Payment Options: Ten Years of Public Service

To entice its populace into entering careers in the public service, the federal government offers a student loan forgiveness program also known as the Loan Forgiveness for Public Service Employees Program. A certain percentage of the student's federal loan will be erased by the Department of Education in exchange for a ten years of serving public which may include public safety, education or social work.

If you have an existing student loan consolidation via the federal Direct Loan Program, then you can qualify for the said initiative. Your student loan should have been directly provided to you by the government and was not granted via third-party lenders. On the other hand, if you have your college student loan provided by private entities, then you need to have said loan consolidated under the Direct Loan Program in order to qualify.

Here are other requirements:
You need to spend one decade in the field of serving the public. Under the program, you are required to stay in public service for a period of ten years where you need to work full-time. During the duration of your decade long forgiveness program, you are also expected to make payments on your student loans that you want to be forgiven.

Make 120 payments. During your 10 year public service, you should be able to make at least 120 payments on the Direct College loan that you want to be forgiven.

Subscribe to a qualifying repayment plan. Before you make 120 payments, you need to sign up with a qualifying repayment plan. There are actually three repayment plans: standard repayment, income-contingent repayment, income-based repayment. If you're already paying your student loan, then you need to make sure that you shift to these payment schemes because only payments made under this scheme will be deemed qualified.

There are various fields that are considered as public service like:

Military. Regardless of what branch and rank, joining the military service is always considered a public service.

Fire Department or Law Enforcement. Joining the police or the local fire department also qualifies as public service.

Public school/library. You don't really have to teach in the public school to qualify. If you are a psychology major, you can be a guidance counselor for a public school and you can still be qualified.

These are just some of the fields that qualify as public service under the loan forgiveness program. If you have a student loan that you want to be forgiven, then check your qualifications and you might just enjoy serving the general public.

Ethics in Public Services

As public body managers, you are tasked to deliver your services to the public and hence you have the responsibility to ensure that the services you provide are not only effective, efficient, reliable but also that their delivery is free from corruption and malpractice. People must get a clear understanding of the important functions of public bodies and the obligations of your organization and yourselves as stipulated in the law.

Important functions of public bodies like your organization, a considerable number of institutions are scheduled by law as public bodies. They are designated as such because their operations and services have important bearings on the interests of the public and society as a whole. For example, they are the:

- Major services providers given a monopoly/ franchise/license by the government like: bus companies, railway companies;

- Organizations spending/disbursing substantial public funds e.g. universities, hospitals;

- Organizations performing public regulatory functions e.g. regulatory bodies of the financial sector and real estate industry;

- Organizations performing other important public service functions e.g. housing and land development bodies, charitable organizations; and

- Major mass media organizations e.g. television and broadcasting stations.

Public management is public trust. As public body managers, you must ensure that your operations are conducted in a fair and responsible way and your staffs maintain a high recognizable standard of conduct so that public trust is upheld and public interest protected.

Ethics and values should be taught in public administration schools. Some argue that ethics principles and values can be taught about but they cannot be taught in the same manner as we teach skills and knowledge of budgeting, information technology, personnel management, policy analysis, and so forth.

The debate continues with little evidence of a consensus emerging anytime soon. Nonetheless, it is imperative that the debate move faster rather than slower least the profession languish in the fields of careerism, technical rationality, and moralist.

The second great war of the 20th century brought the mythology of the politics/administration dichotomy to its knees and was the beginning of the end of the prevailing orthodoxy that administrators are and should be passion-less dispensers of public goods and services, thus freeing up a renewal of public administration.

The New Public Service advocated by Denhardt and Denhardt (2000). Their vision is one in which public administrators return to their roots as guardians of democracy.

They further enunciate seven principles that, individually and collectively, provide a normative framework for the professional public administrator.

Nonetheless, renewal will not be an easy task for professional associations, public administration educators, or those who toil in the day-in and day-out work of making their communities a better place to live, work, and play. Some albeit limited help might be found in a recently published collection of essays and articles.

Rediscovery and renewal, as this discussion highlights, is certainly fermenting within the academy. Adams and Balfour call for unmasking administrative evil has not gone unnoticed. Nor has Frederickson challenge to put the public back in public service or the Denhardt vision for a New Public Service been lost in the early years of the 21 st Century. Yet the findings reported by Light cannot be dismissed lightly. What then can and should we expect in the years ahead? Where do body and soul of public administration reside? If not in or among professional associations or in the workplace, must we conclude that our search is in vain? No. Two significant events are most revealing-the tragedy and triumph of September 11 th 2001 and the financial and organizational meltdown of corporate titans such as Enron, WorldCom, AOL Time Warner, and Arthur Anderson.

The culture of self-enrichment embedded in the business executive corps that has sapped employees, shareholders, and the American public speaks volumes to the culture of greed and self-serving. An ethical meltdown comparable to that in the corporate world borders on the unimaginable if not unthinkable in all but a few American cities and states. Even more dramatically, the tragedy of September 11 brought forth in clear view for the world to see the triumph of goodness in the courageous efforts by passengers and crew members on the ill-fated United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed into Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and the fire, police, and military men and women who rushed to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to preserve life and property.

These deeds in the air and on the streets of New York and Washington remind us that public service is truly about caring for others and this is the essence of public administration. The body and soul of public administration reside in service to others whether on the street, in a distant region or location around the world, or in the offices of thousands of public agencies.

Still, there is a substantial need for greater awareness of and commitment to the idealism of public service. Can do must be exalted by should do. Public service is, as so often uttered but so seldom heard, a noble calling. Perhaps we should remind ourselves of this day-in and day-out and draw on this feeling to animate our work as educators and public administrators. The result may well be a true and profound rediscovery and renewal of public administration as a field of study and practice.

Emerging Markets Corporate Governance Research Network (EMCGN) Newsletter, April 2011

The third International Conference on Corporate Governance in Emerging Markets is approaching. 36 papers out of more than 200 submissions have been accepted and announced on the conference Web site. On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to thank the EMCGN members for their interest and support.

In our second issue of EMCGN Newsletter, we start our Publications section with Randall Morck's latest paper, which annotates the role of business groups in developing countries in economic development. Developing countries are not "America, but poorer" Morck argues. "Understanding good governance in less developed countries requires understanding business groups." We continue with Mark J. Roe's paper, in which he investigates the links between polity and capital markets in developed and emerging economies.

The papers that follow Morck's and Roe's papers are empirical. The first one by Lin, Ma, Maletesta and Xuan is a cross country study that confirms that the divergence between control rights and cash-flow rights in the borrowing firms exacerbates potential tunneling and other moral hazard activities by controlling shareholders, thereby increases the credit risk and monitoring needs. The second one by Qian, Pan and Yeung, based on data on China, finds that politically connected firms are more likely to expropriate minority shareholders.

In the Opinions section we present reports on Russia, Taiwan (China) and Turkey. The reports on Russia and Taiwan (China) give concrete suggestions and constructive comments on how to implement more powerful governance strategies. We conclude this section with an IFC publication on the current status of "sustainable investments" in Turkey.

Corporate Ownership Structure and Bank Loan Syndicate Structure

Using a hand-collected dataset, the authors examine the relationship between corporate ownership and bank loan syndicate structures. They discover that divergence between control and cash-flow rights of a borrowing firm’s largest ultimate owner has a significant impact on the concentration and composition of the firm’s loan syndicate. The effects of excess control rights on the syndicate structure is more pronounced for globally opaque firms, for firms with higher cash-flow rights dispersion across large owners, and for firms in economically troubled countries. In contrast, the relationship between control-ownership divergence and syndicate structure is mitigated by the lead arranger’s reputation and lending relationship with the borrowing firm as well as by strong shareholder rights and good credit information sharing systems. Overall, the results confirm that the deviation of control and cash-flow rights in the borrowing firms exacerbates potential tunneling and other moral hazard activities by large shareholders, thereby increases the credit risk and monitoring needs. Thus, the lenders form syndicates with structures that facilitate enhanced due diligence and monitoring efforts as well as the syndication process.

History

ATR 72 taking of from Manchester Airport

 Aurigny Air Services was founded by Sir Derrick Bailey and started operations on 1 March 1968 after British United Airways withdrew the Alderney to Guernsey route. It operated Britten-Norman Islander aircraft originally.[2] During the first year of operations the airline carried 45,000 passengers between Guernsey, Jersey and Alderney. In July 1971 Aurigny became the first commercial operator of the Britten-Norman Trislander and the airline remains the world’s largest operator of the type. Use of this larger aircraft enabled the route structure to be developed to include the south coast of England and northern France.[2] In 1977, Aurigny was the first airline in the world to ban smoking on all services.

In 1993 Aurigny wins a contract to carry mail between The Channel Islands and the UK and in 1999 it began daily services to London Stansted Airport operated by Saab 340 aircraft.

Ownership of the airline passed from Aurigny Aviation Holdings to Close Brothers Private Equity on 23 May 2000, but was wholly acquired by States of Guernsey on 15 May 2003. It employs 300 staff in the Channel Islands, France and the United Kingdom.[3][3] Aurigny also operates charter services, wet-leases aircraft to other operators and is a handling agent for Lufthansa which operates seasonal services from Germany to Guernsey and Air Southwest which runs services from Plymouth to Guernsey.

In June 2006, a survey by market researchers islandopinion.com showed that Aurigny is the most popular airline flying out of Guernsey. On 21 June 2007, Aurigny got permission from its sole shareholder, the States of Guernsey, to raise a private loan to purchase two new ATR 72-500 aircraft which entered service in March 2009.

In 2008, when Aurigny celebrated 40 years in operation, it was voted 4th best short-haul airline in a poll published in the consumer magazine Which?. In a survey of 30,000 Which? members, the publication looked at 71 airlines and asked readers to rate each carrier for check-in, cabin staff, cleanliness, food and entertainment.

In March 2009, Aurigny was granted a licence to operate services between Jersey and London Stansted, and between Guernsey and East Midlands. Daily flights between these destinations commenced from 1 May 2009. Also on 1 May 2009 the frequency of flights from Guernsey to London Gatwick was increased from 4 to 5 daily return flights. In August 2009, Aurigny announced that it would be operating winter flights to Grenoble using its ATR 72-500 equipment. The flights will run from December 26, 2009 to mid-way through February 2010.

July 2010 saw the leak that Blue Islands was planning to buy Aurigny, and undergoing a due diligence process with Treasury and Resources department of the States of Guernsey. On 14th September 2010 Treasury and Resources announced that the sale would not go ahead.[4][5]

In April 2011 Aurigny becomes a handling agent for Air Berlin which operates seasonal flights to Hannover and Dusseldorf.

 

Aurigny Air Services

ATR 72 taking off

ATR 72 lands at Bristol Airport

ATR 72 taking of from Manchester Airport

Aurigny Air Services Limited is an airline with its head office on the grounds of Guernsey Airport in Forest, Guernsey, Channel Islands,[1] and wholly owned by the States of Guernsey. It operates passenger and freight services between the Channel Islands, western France and England. Its main base is Guernsey Airport, with hubs at Jersey Airport and Alderney Airport. Aurigny is one of the longest serving regional airlines in the world.

Its name “Aurigny” comes from the French/Auregnais name for Alderney, whose local language was made extinct by the evacuation of locals during the occupation of the Channel Islands in World War 2.

 

Compensation

A key issue in nationalization is payment of compensation to the former owner. The most controversial nationalizations, known as expropriations, are those where no compensation, or an amount far below the likely market value of the nationalized assets, is paid. Many nationalizations through expropriation have come after revolutions.

The traditional Western stance on compensation was expressed by United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull, during the 1938 Mexican nationalization of the petroleum industry, that compensation should be "prompt, effective and adequate." According to this view, the nationalizing state is obligated under international law to pay the deprived party the full value of the property taken. The opposing position has been taken mainly by developing countries, claiming that the question of compensation should be left entirely up to the sovereign state, in line with the Calvo Doctrine. Communist states have held that no compensation is due, based on socialist notions of private properties.

In 1962, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 1803, "Permanent Sovereignty over National Resources", which states that in the event of nationalization, the owner "shall be paid appropriate compensation in accordance with international law." In doing so, the UN rejected both the traditional Calvo-doctrinist view and the Communist view. The term "appropriate compensation" represents a compromise between the traditional views, taking into account the need of developing countries to pursue reform even without the ability to pay full compensation, and the Western concern for protection of private property.

When nationalizing a large business, the cost of compensation is so great that many legal nationalizations have happened when firms of national importance run close to bankruptcy and can be acquired by the government for little or no money. A classic example is the UK nationalization of the British Leyland Motor Corporation. At other times, governments have considered it important to gain control of institutions of strategic economic importance, such as banks or railways, or of important industries struggling economically. The case of Rolls-Royce plc, nationalized in 1971, is an interesting blend of these two arguments. This policy was sometimes known as ensuring government control of the "commanding heights" of the economy, to enable it to manage the economy better in terms of long-term development and medium-term stability. The extent of this policy declined in the 1980s and 1990s as governments increasingly privatized industries that had been nationalized, replacing their strategic economic influence with use of the tax system and of interest rates.

Nonetheless, national and local governments have seen the advantage of keeping key strategic assets in institutions that are not strongly profit-driven and can raise funds outside the public-sector constraints, but still retain some public accountability. Examples from the last five years in the United Kingdom include the vesting of the British railway infrastructure firm Railtrack in the not-for-profit company Network Rail, and the divestment of much council housing stock to "arms-length management companies", often with mutual status.

Nationalization

Nationalisation, also spelled nationalization, is the process of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government or state.[1] Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being transferred to the public sector to be operated by or owned by the state. The opposite of nationalization is usually privatization or de-nationalisation, but may also be municipalization.

A renationalization occurs when state-owned assets are privatized and later nationalized again, often when a different political party or faction is in power. A renationalization process may also be called reverse privatization. Nationalization has been used to refer to either direct state-ownership and management of an enterprise or to a government acquiring a large controlling share of a nominally private, publicly listed corporation.[citation needed]

The motives for nationalization are political as well as economic. It is a central theme of certain brands of 'state socialist' policy that the means of production, distribution and exchange, should be owned by the state on behalf of the people or working class to allow for rational allocation of output, consolidation of resources, and rational planning or control of the economy. Many socialists believe that public ownership enables people to exercise full democratic control over the means whereby they earn their living and provides an effective means of distributing output to benefit the public at large, and a means for providing public finance.

Nationalized industries, charged with operating in the public interest, may be under strong political and social pressures to give much more attention to externalities. They may be obliged to operate some loss making activities where social benefits are clearly greater than social costs - for example, rural postal and transport services. As an instance, the United States Postal Service is guaranteed its nationalised status by the Constitution. The government has recognized these social obligations and, in some cases, provides subsidies for such non-commercial operations.

Since the nationalised industries are state owned, the government is responsible for meeting any debts incurred by these industries. The nationalized industries do not normally borrow from the domestic market other than for short-term borrowing. However, if profitable, the profit is often used as a means to finance other state services such as social programs and government research which can help lower the tax burden.

Nationalization may occur with or without compensation to the former owners. If it takes place without compensation it is a case of expropriation. Nationalization is distinguished from property redistribution in that the government retains control of nationalized property. Some nationalizations take place when a government seizes property acquired illegally. For example, the French government seized the car-makers Renault because its owners had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of France.

Public Service Announcement (PSA) Radio Copy Writing Success Article Source

What if the Super Bowl television commercials were all public service announcement (PSA) advertisements rather than beer, cars and soda commercials? Imagine, The Red Cross followed by the Make A Wish Foundation and the Shriners Hospital. Would the world still remained glued to the television? If the writers approached the copy for these PSA with the same creativity as the beer commercials, we believe the answer is yes. Why? Because a good commercial, is a good commercial. Period.

Radio voice and copy writing experts at http://www.scottradio.com know that the assignment of writing a PSA is often put on the back burner in most copy departments. The paying customer is first in the cue. When the time arrives to write the PSA copy, the energy and enthusiasm has often expired. But it should have never evolved this way. Thanks to misguided copy departments of the past, we all suffer today with less than stellar radio public service announcements. The time to change is now.

Radio stations are required to air a certain amount of PSA's each year. Because the quality is often second rate compared to other commercials in the rotation, a station cannot air these on prime time. If given the opportunity, they will. In fact, scottradio.com has experienced such results. Write a good commercial, be it for soda or Cancer research and it will makes its way into the rotation. Why? Because radio stations are begging for quality public service announcements.

Scott Perreault is a radio and narration voice veteran with over twenty years of broadcasting and voice work experience. From the writing, production and development of radio campaigns to the recording of a two-hour audio book, Scott has experienced many facets of the voice business. Scott resides in both California and Minnesota.

UK Coalition Government Plans Large Public Service Green Energy Roll Out Article Source

In a bid to become the greenest government ever, the Coalition has recently devised a plan to allow public buildings to make a profit producing and selling back energy generated by green technologies. Wind turbines, solar panels, and even wave and tidal technologies will pay for themselves and generate income for councils looking for ways to maintain financial stability in difficult economic times. An energy saving smart meter can monitor the energy saving that each installation provides.
The Local Government Act, established in 1976, has forbidden councils to sell excess power generated back to the grid in an attempt to protect the newly established private electric companies of that time. This ban made it impossible for councils to profit from the sale of electricity generated using green technologies. The reversal of the ban opens a new era of money generation from solar and wind generators bring revenue to local councils. The incentive is certainly there now and it is expected that hundreds of green generating units will quickly be installed along with an accompanying energy monitor.
Solar panels placed on south facing walls or roofs and wind generators placed strategically in car parks could generate an average of 10,000 pounds per year for just a single installation on the town hall building. With most councils owning multiple facilities, further installations could bring in considerably more than this amount.
Schools, hospitals, and parks are all sites that could be used to generate electricity. Wind turbines are not efficient when mounted on most buildings, but a park setting allows the installation of a pole-mounted turbine at a height of at least 150 ft. Caution is advised in areas with scenic and historic views; alternatives to wind generators should be used in these areas.
The goals of the project are multiple. Generating significant quantities of green energy will help the Government meet its carbon emission reduction goals of cutting CO2 by one third in the next decade. The money generated for councils will bolster local economies, and the highly visible nature of the installations will help foster a nationwide attitude of acceptance and pride in green technologies.
A major factor in this plan to green the UK is the "Feed in Tariff" that subsidizes the generation of electricity from green technologies. The Government put this program, also known as the "Clean Energy Cashback," into place in February 2010. It allows local governments and schools to benefit from generating a portion of their own electricity, assists in keeping energy costs down, and additionally allows profits from the sale of the electricity produced. Each unit of electricity produced is financially rewarded by this programme, no matter if it is used by the council or put back into the grid. In addition, money is generated by the portion of the power that is fed to the grid. The payments for the programme are guaranteed by law for 25 years.