Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban. In particular, one of the most compelling arguments against more troops rests on this stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.

It’s hard to do the calculation precisely, but for the cost of 40,000 troops over a few years — well, we could just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

The hawks respond: It’s naïve to think that you can sprinkle a bit of education on a war-torn society. It’s impossible to build schools now because the Taliban will blow them up.

In fact, it’s still quite possible to operate schools in Afghanistan — particularly when there’s a strong “buy-in” from the local community.

Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” has now built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan — and not one has been burned down or closed. The aid organization CARE has 295 schools educating 50,000 girls in Afghanistan, and not a single one has been closed or burned by the Taliban. The Afghan Institute of Learning, another aid group, has 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the Taliban (although local communities have temporarily suspended three for security reasons).

In short, there is still vast scope for greater investment in education, health and agriculture in Afghanistan. These are extraordinarily cheap and have a better record at stabilizing societies than military solutions, which, in fact, have a pretty dismal record.

In Afghanistan, for example, we have already increased our troop presence by 40,000 troops since the beginning of last year, yet the result has not been the promised stability but only more casualties and a strengthened insurgency. If the last surge of 40,000 troops didn’t help, why will the next one be so different?

Matthew P. Hoh, an American military veteran who was the top civilian officer in Zabul Province, resigned over Afghan policy, as The Washington Post reported this week. Mr. Hoh argues that our military presence is feeding the insurgency, not quelling it.

Already our troops have created a backlash with Kabul University students this week burning President Obama in effigy until police dispersed them with gunshots. The heavier our military footprint, the more resentment — and perhaps the more legitimacy for the Taliban.

Schools are not a quick fix or silver bullet any more than troops are. But we have abundant evidence that they can, over time, transform countries, and in the area near Afghanistan there’s a nice natural experiment in the comparative power of educational versus military tools.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $15 billion in Pakistan, mostly on military support, and today Pakistan is more unstable than ever. In contrast, Bangladesh, which until 1971 was a part of Pakistan, has focused on education in a way that Pakistan never did. Bangladesh now has more girls in high school than boys. (In contrast, only 3 percent of Pakistani women in the tribal areas are literate.)

Those educated Bangladeshi women joined the labor force, laying the foundation for a garment industry and working in civil society groups like BRAC and Grameen Bank. That led to a virtuous spiral of development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and stability. That’s one reason Al Qaeda is holed up in Pakistan, not in Bangladesh, and it’s a reminder that education can transform societies.

When I travel in Pakistan, I see evidence that one group — Islamic extremists — believes in the transformative power of education. They pay for madrassas that provide free schooling and often free meals for students. They then offer scholarships for the best pupils to study abroad in Wahhabi madrassas before returning to become leaders of their communities. What I don’t see on my trips is similar numbers of American-backed schools. It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists.

For roughly the same cost as stationing 40,000 troops in Afghanistan for one year, we could educate the great majority of the 75 million children worldwide who, according to Unicef, are not getting even a primary education. We won’t turn them into graduate students, but we can help them achieve literacy. Such a vast global education campaign would reduce poverty, cut birth rates, improve America’s image in the world, promote stability and chip away at extremism.

Education isn’t a panacea, and no policy in Afghanistan is a sure bet. But all in all, the evidence suggests that education can help foster a virtuous cycle that promotes stability and moderation. So instead of sending 40,000 troops more to Afghanistan, how about opening 40,000 schools?

NY Times

At a press conference this morning, ProgressNow Colorado described how Norton's first financial disclosures include corrupt DC lobbyists organized by her sister and brother-in-law, both of whom are DC lobbyists.  They revealed a confidential invitation spearheaded by Norton's relatives and the lobbyist money that followed.

The group also joined over 400 of its members in calling on former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton to sign the "Family Transparency Pledge" rejecting trips, gifts, campaign donations and benefits from relatives who are lobbyists.

"A puppet of corporate lobbyists in her family, Norton is the DC lobbyist's dream candidate," noted Michael Huttner, Founder of ProgressNow Colorado, the state's largest online progressive advocacy organization.  "It's only been a month and already Norton has a record of surrounding herself with corrupt DC lobbyists."

Since the morning Norton announced her campaign, over 400 Coloradans have joined the call for Norton to sign the pledge.  She continues to refuse to sign it.

"We call on Jane Norton to stop placing DC special interests in Washington and sign the 'Family Transparency Pledge' today," stated Huttner.  "We believe that Norton needs to reject trips or economic benefits through her relatives who are lobbyists."

Norton has failed to sign the "Family Transparency Pledge":

I, Jane Norton, pledge to the People of Colorado, that I am committed to fighting the undue influence of special interests in Washington, DC.

Accordingly, I pledge that I will reject any trips, gifts, campaign donations or economic benefits that are provided to me through my relatives who are lobbyists by the companies that hire them to influence public policy.

Download a printable .PDF copy of the Pledge here:

http://www.progressnowcolorado.org/page/-/Family%20Transparency%20Pledge.pdf

Norton's relatives who are lobbyists include:

Judy Black (Norton's sister) is a DC lobbyist whose clients include those from the for-profit health care and medical device companies, oil companies, chemical companies and the banking industry. (Washington Post, June 10, 2004; U.S. Secretary of the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Database, 9/10/2009)

Charlie Black (Norton's brother in law) head of BKSH & Associates is a DC lobbyist and made a lucrative career of representing foreign oil companies, tobacco companies, drug companies, auto companies and defense contractors. (Washington Post, 12/31/2007; Business Week, 7/19/2004) and evenZaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.(People's Weekly World, 3/1/2008)  Black is so deeply entwined with tobacco companies he is known in Washington as "Mr. Tobacco."

The well-connected Black used BKSH & Associates to cash in on the homeland security consulting bonanza after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was a consultant to Ahmad Chalabi, the CIA-connected Iraqi whose lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction promoted Bush's preemptive war on Iraq. BKSH also coached Eric Prince, CEO of Blackwater USA, before he testified on his mercenary company's massacre of scores of innocent Iraqis. (PWW)

A sample of Lobbyists in Norton's Disclosures (amount date of donation):

Alex Castellanos $2400 on 9/29, a CNN talking head recently exposed for being a media buyer for America's Health Insurance Plan's (AHIP) during the health care debate, he was an adviser to Bush/Cheney 2004, and known for being the "father of the modern attack ad," was the creator of the race-baiting Jesse Helms "Hands" ad [Politico, 10/15/09; www.natmedia.com; Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, 10/15/08]

Kristen Chadwick $500 on 9/22:  She lobbies for the European Aeronautic Defense & Space Company (EADS). Her work for EADS came under scrutiny recently after it was revealed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had written letters to the Defense Department asking it to reconsider a contracting requirement seen as disadvantageous to EADS. Shortly thereafter, the Defense Department made the requested change, and EADS eventually won the $35 billion contract to manufacture the next generation of in-flight refueling tanker planes.(New York Times, 3/12/2008)

Rick Davis $2000 on 9/30, John McCain's on-again-off-again 2008 campaign chief, was one of the Washington uber-lobbyists behind McCain's political operation from Davis Manafort, who lobbied for Verizon and foreign governments, including some unregistered liaison work between Sen. McCain and a Russian oligarch [NY Times, 5/20/08; Washington Post, 1/25/08] Davis came under fire for his conflicts of interest as McCain's 2000 campaign manager, since his clients SBC Communications Inc. and Comsat Corp. had mergers pending before Chairman McCain's Senate Commerce Committee.[Politico, 7/11/07]

Frank Donatelli $1000 on 9/29, a former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and recently elected chair of GOPAC, now a lobbyist and director of federal public affairs McGuireWoods Consulting, where his past clients have included Anthem and Verizon [www.opensecrets.org;www.mwcllc.com].  McGuireWoods was part of the legal defense team for indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and was fined $4,500 by the FEC in 2005 on an unrelated matter for failing to file a quarterly report for its PAC in 2004 [Richmond Times Dispatch, 11/24/05, accessed via Nexis 10/26/09]

Benjamin L. Ginsberg $500 on 9/29, GOP election lawyer who led the Bush-Gore recount, and currently a lobbyist at mega-lobbying shop Patton-Boggs LLP [www.opensecrets.org; www.pattonboggs.com].  Ginsberg resigned from the 2004 Bush campaign after it was discovered that he had consulted with both the campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but maintained, after the Kerry campaign filed an FEC complaint, that his dual roles were legal. [Roll Call, 8/30/04]

Susan B. Hirschmann $1000 on 9/30, a former chief of staff to Tom DeLay, who went from Congress through the revolving door to become a lobbyist at Williams & Jensen, where her clients include AstraZenica, Pfizer, and Wyeth [www.opensecrets.org; www.williamsandjensen.com]  At DeLay's office, Hirschmann had worked with Jack Abramoff's office to arrange a famous trip to St. Andrews golf course in Scotland, with her husband travelling on Abramoff's credit card [Washington Post, 12/20/06].  Hirschmann was one of the top two congressional staff members to take privately financed travel between 2000-2005, totaling $85,000 over a 26-month period [Washington Post, 6/9/06; Center for Public Integrity, 6/8/06]

Bob Livingston $500 on 9/10, the one-time successor to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Appropriations Committee Chairman, who resigned from the US House during the Clinton impeachment after allegations of extramarital affairs surfaced.  Livingston became a lobbyist within a week of leaving Congress, founding the Livingston Group, which earned over $9 million in lobbying income in 2008 [Times-Picayune, 8/13/09, accessed via Nexis 10/25/09;www.opensecrets.org].  A report in 2007 claimed that a third of his firm's income came from foreign governments [NY Times, 10/17/07]  Livingston was once part of a team of investors that tried to open a restaurant with Jack Abramoff before scandal broke and the deal fell through. [Roll Call, 11/17/05]

Scott W. Reed $500 on 9/25, Bob Dole's 1996 campaign manager and now a lobbyist and founder of Chesapeake Enterprises  [www.opensecrets.org], has lobbied and consulted with numerous clients, including the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, who hired Reed along with Charlie Black [Real Estate Finance Today, 7/17/00, accessed via Nexis 10/26/09].  Other clients included American Taxpayers Alliance, a group that ran attack ads to sway the 2002 Illinois Supreme Court elections in favor of a pro-US Chamber of Commerce justice candidate. [Forbes, 7/21/03] Reed inherited the Saginaw Chippewa tribe of Michigan as a client from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff after Sen. McCain launched an investigation into Abramoff's activities. [The Hill, 5/8/07]

Ed Rogers $500 on 9/25, chairman of The BGR Group, which he founded with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, lists Citigroup, the Kurdistan Regional Government, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Raytheon among his clients.  Rogers was exposed engaging in a campaign to undermine Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, contradicting the official policy of the White House in Iraq [www.bgrdc.com; www.opensecrets.org; CNN, 8/24/07]

Norton has yet to disclose why she never registered as a lobbyist:

Norton refuses to explain why she never personally registered as a lobbyist, even though she was the head of "Government Relations" for a health insurance lobbying organization. The press yesterday to the company confirmed Norton headed "the lobbying arm" of the company. (Colorado Independent, 9/14/2009;Washington Times, 9/14/2009)

Between 1994 and 1999, Norton was the Director of Government Relations for the Medical Group Management Association, the public policy and lobbying arm of a for-profit health trade lobbying organization.  (Denver Post, December 19, 1999)  Yet an extensive search of state and federal lobbyist disclosure records has not found any lobbying disclosure records by Norton. (U.S. Secretary of the Senate Lobbyists Disclosure Database and Colorado SOS Lobbyist Database) The entire time, it appears that Norton never registered as either a federal or state lobbyist.

• Bradford Plumer
• October 23, 2009 | 12:39 pm

For reasons explained before [1], we'll likely all be driving electric cars long before we ever see mass-market vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, which was once the great clean-car hope. Still, the fuel-cell approach is obviously worth researching, and now researchers have lit upon [2] a particularly promising fuel source. Oh yes, urine:

Using hydrogen to power cars has become an increasingly attractive transportation fuel, as the only emission produced is water - but a major stumbling block is the lack of a cheap, renewable source of the fuel. Gerardine Botte of Ohio University may now have found the answer, using an electrolytic approach to produce hydrogen from urine—the most abundant waste on Earth—at a fraction of the cost of producing hydrogen from water.

Urine's major constituent is urea, which incorporates four hydrogen atoms per molecule—importantly, less tightly bonded than the hydrogen atoms in water molecules. Botte used electrolysis to break the molecule apart, developing an inexpensive new nickel-based electrode to selectively and efficiently oxidise the urea. To break the molecule down, a voltage of 0.37V needs to be applied across the cell—much less than the 1.23V needed to split water.

Good to know! Meanwhile, there's an opposing school of thought that, while piss-powered cars are awfully promising, we should really be conserving our urine for other, more important ecological purposes:

However, Logan does feel that it would be a good idea to start saving up our urine—although not for the hydrogen. 'You have to remember about the P [phosphorus] in pee—globally we need to start thinking about conserving phosphorus for fertiliser, because, just like oil, one day the deposits are all going to run out and we need to start building phosphorus recycling into our infrastructure,' he says.

More on peak phosphorous here [3].

NY Times

Depending on the cooling technology utilized, the water requirements for a nuclear power station can vary between 20 to 83 per cent more than for other power stations.

Denver Water Consumption

When both reactors at the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania operate in summer,  nearly 30 million gallons of makeup water per day (or nearly 21,000 gallons per minute) are needed from the river to compensate for cooling tower drift.

Colorado Electricity Consumption

44,236 MW = About 37 nuclear reactors = 550 Million gallons of water per day = Over twice the daily consumption of water in Denver.  Cost of one reactor = $6 to $9 Billion = cost of 37 reactors = $333 Billion @ $9 Billion each.  $333 Billion = 41,625,000 rooftop water heaters @ $8000 each.  Hot water for bathing, etc. accounts for 13% of household energy consumption = 5,750 MW = 4.8 nuclear reactors = $43.2 Billion = 5.4 Million rooftop water heaters.

Is nuclear power renewable energy?

Nuclear energy uses Uranium as fuel, which is a scarce resource. The supply of Uranium is expected to last only for the next 30 to 60 years (depending on the actual demand). Therefore nuclear energy is not a renewable energy.

If Initiative 300 in Denver passes, and you forget your wallet and get pulled over, police officers will be forced to impound your car leaving you stranded.

Which is why we're asking for your help. We need you to vote No on Initiative 300 if you live in Denver County.

It's deceptive. It's scary. It's expensive. And it's unnecessary.

Police officers already have the ability to impound vehicles if they are concerned about public safety. The Denver Post, Mayor Hickenlooper, ten members of the Denver City Council, House Speaker Terrence Carroll, and a long list of Denver community organizations and individuals oppose Initiative 300. And the proponents of this nightmare are counting on low turnout in an off-year election to sneak this one past us.

• Send an e-mail to 5 friends in Denver and ask them to vote no.
• Talk to your friends, neighbors, and co-workers in person about how important it is for them to return their ballots, and ask them to vote no on Initiative 300.
• Sign up to volunteer.

As for voting, the 2009 Election will be Mail-In Ballot only. Voting couldn't be easier-- it just takes 2 stamps to return, or you can drop it off to the Denver Election Commission in person. So please Vote NO on Initiative 300 and help spread the word.

If you live in Denver, you should have received your ballot in the mail. To check on your voter registration and on the status of your ballot, click here to look it up at the Secretary of State:

http://www.sos.state.co.us/Voter

If you believe you are registered to vote and you have not received your ballot, call 311 today.

It is possible that the workers at King Soopers and Safeway may be forced to strike, or worse--they could get locked out soon. They have been negotiating hard for a new contract since this spring, but the highly profitable grocery corporations don't want to put enough money in the pension fund to cover the pensions the workers were promised.

If there is a strike, we want you to be ready to shop somewhere else to avoid crossing a picket line.

We've made this nifty map that you can use to shop responsibly. Check it out. And if there are locally-owned stores in your area that don't show on the map, use the link on the map page to submit those locations and we'll add them.

http://www.progressnowcolorado.org/ShopResponsibly

A Censored Headline and why it Matters:

German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting

Justices of the German Federal Constitutional Court.  Image

Michael Collins

(DailyCensored.Com)  The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world.  They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States.  They effectively outlawed electronic voting.  On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.

Absurdity upon Absurdity

Michael Collins

The health care debate and general political climate compound absurdity upon absurdity.

First we're told that our health care is only worth the time and effort if the remedy has no negative impact on the budget.  No deficits allowed.  The deficit risk defines your chances for health and longevity.

At the same time, we see that Wall Street failures and the overseas war effort are not held to the same standard on deficits spending.

"— Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area."

Could $292,000 pay for a college or trade school education, room and board?  Subsidize a young person until they could land a good job?  With the change left over, could it pay to make high school more hospitable to the poor? For public works projects? For more teachers? Research and development?  We ignore the needs of young people at a terrible cost. And yes, it does take a village.  What are the economic effects of 1.2 million high school dropouts per year?  At $7,300 per student, that amounts to $8.76 billion a year, year two adds another 1.2 million students and becomes $17.52 billion, ad infinitum. Can we solve the problem?  Can we afford not to? What can you buy with $8.76 billion?  How about 175,200 teachers at $50 K a pop, that's one teacher for every 7 dropouts.  MC

"The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime."

The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.

Researchers at Northeastern University used census and other government data to carry out the study, which tracks the employment, workplace, parenting and criminal justice experiences of young high school dropouts.

"We’re trying to show what it means to be a dropout in the 21st century United States," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, who headed a team of researchers that prepared the report. "It’s one of the country’s costliest problems. The unemployment, the incarceration rates — it’s scary."

A coalition of civil rights and public education advocacy groups and a network of alternative schools in Chicago commissioned the report as part of a push for new educational opportunities for the nation’s 6.2 million high school dropouts.

"The dropout rate is driving the nation’s increasing prison population, and it’s a drag on America’s economic competitiveness," said Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who is president of the National Urban League, one of the groups in the coalition that commissioned the report. "This report makes it clear that every American pays a cost when a young person leaves school without a diploma."

The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.

Continued at the: NY Times

From the Bob Herbert op/ed, "Igniting the Growth of Jobs"

NY Times

'40,000 teachers lost their jobs in the last year.  16 to 29 year olds, worst unemployment ever since national records have been kept.  One in four black men in Illinois between the ages of 20 and 24 has a job.'

One of the regents of the University of Colorado, Michael Carrigan, told me that Colorado had a return on investment of 40 to 1 for each dollar invested in higher ed. The only figures I could find for Colorado was a 15.07 percent return.  New Jersey leads the nation with 42.32 percent, followed by Massachusetts 39.16, New York 37.82, California 36.53 percent.  All in all a substantial return on investment.  The lowest in the nation, predictably, was Mississippi at 6.49 percent.  Most surprisingly, Indiana is second from the bottom at 7.22 percent

Higher Ed Return on Investment for States

Most significantly, Herbert says this:

""The past," as William Faulkner told us, "is not dead. It’s not even past." The lessons of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s are right in front of us, ready to be studied, analyzed, updated and applied to the present-day needs of the country."

I hate to say this, but we are a country of nepotism, in our unions, our military, in corporations, in government.  Because of this "inbreeding" and counterproductive behavior, we must import the brightest minds/strongest work ethics from around the world to carry our water and be used as if indentured servants.  It is all a vast pyramid scheme where the unqualified extinguish the flames of the most gifted and reap the rewards off the backs of the timid.  Their only qualification?  Being members of the lucky sperm club.  Here's something the "conservative revision" Bible will surely leave out, "As you have done to the least of these......."  The least very much includes the youthful poor, who have no say in the conditions they find themselves in and obviously don't have the attention of those that have the most.  While we argue about war, healthcare, social justice, gay rights, Obama's Nobel Prize, etc., no one considers our most precious asset nor what should be our greatest legacy to them, "Liberty and Justice for all.."  This is what is great about the idea of America, eloquently pronounced in the Preamble of the Constitution, not just to ourselves but to our Posterity,  the word was capitalized unlike the word "ourselves":

Senator Michael Bennet was one of 30 signatories on a letter to the Senate leadership demanding that the HELP Committee's optional public insurance plan be included in the final bill. The next day, Senator Bennet, Senator Udall (not ours, but his cousin from New Mexico), and others joined Senator Brown on the floor to press for the public option in person.

"............We accept that life is unfair, that some people will live in cramped apartments and others in sprawling mansions. But our existing insurance system is not simply inequitable but also lethal: a very recent, peer-reviewed article in the American Journal of Public Health finds that nearly 45,000 uninsured people die annually as a consequence of not having insurance. That’s one needless death every 12 minutes.

When nearly 3,000 people were killed on 9/11, we began wars and were willing to devote more than $1 trillion in additional expenses. Yet about the same number of Americans die from our failed insurance system every three weeks.

The obstacle isn’t so much money as priorities. America made it a priority to provide tax breaks, largely to the wealthy, in the Bush years, at a 10-year cost including interest of $2.4 trillion. Allocating less than half that much to assure equal access to health care isn’t deemed an equal priority............."

Complete Op/Ed at The NY Times

"Don't look back, they may be gaining on you." :-))

denver and the west

Romanoff's Senate campaign raises more than $200,000

By The Denver Post

The campaign for U.S. Senate candidate-come-lately Andrew Romanoff said Tuesday that it had raised more than $200,000 in the 21 days he was eligible to collect donations in the third quarter.

Romanoff needed a big start to show he's viable, though he will have to keep up the pace to compete with the fundraising juggernaut of Sen. Michael Bennet, who has taken in $2.5 million and counting since his appointment in January, analysts say.

Romanoff fundraisers collected cash from more than 1,500 individuals, said spokeswoman Joelle Martinez, using that figure to bolster Romanoff's image as the race's grassroots candidate.

Continued at the Denver Post

CollegeInvest, the agency that runs Colorado's student-loan forgiveness and scholarship plans, lost track of many of the students it was supposed to help, managing to distribute only $91,000 of the $3.8 million lawmakers expected it to hand out last year.

The agency also spent $12 million in administrative expenses, not including salaries and benefits for 37 employees, a state audit found.

CollegeInvest gave 76 students a total of $91,000 in Early Achievers Scholarships in fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, state auditors said.

[...]

Auditors found that for the past two years, CollegeInvest had more than $12 million in administrative expenses, not including salaries and benefits for 37 employees.

The agency spent almost $10 in administrative costs for every $1 disbursed in the Early Achiever Scholarships, the audit said.

Because of a reporting error, an editorial on Page 10B on Friday about CollegeInvest said the division incurred $12 million over four years to get its scholarship program up and running. That amount covered all of CollegeInvest's operations, which includes scholarship programs, college savings plans and student loans.