International

With federally subsidized Stafford Student loan interest rates set to double on July 1st, Rep. Peter Welch announces efforts to block the increase. 
The announcement comes as student loan debt is reaching a crisis point. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, student loan debt has reached $870 billion. That number exceeds credit card and auto loan debt and is expected to continue rising.
Welch is joined by Cody Paiva, a UVM junior; Patrick Mangus, a recent graduate of CCV; Ben Truman, a parent of a student entering college; and Don Vickers, President and CEO of Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC), to discuss legislation he is pushing in the U.S House to avert the scheduled rate hike. 

Rep. Peter Welch discusses his trip to the Middle East.  Rep. Peter Welch, urges President Obama to take action and get a cop on the beat that will enforce election rules in the Wild West campaign environment ushered in by Citizens United. Because of partisanship gridlock at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and in the Senate, the FEC is widely viewed as a paralyzed and ineffective agency.  Welch will be joined for the announcement tomorrow by Paul Burns, Executive Director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and Robert Millar, a Vermont activist who has worked to bring the resolution repealing Citizens United to the ballot in Winooski.

Senator Patrick Leahy Leahy, Champlain College student activists and a representative of Invisible Children discuss the KONY 2012 campaign, aimed at bringing African war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. A documentary on the issue, KONY 2012, has gone viral on the internet, netting nearly 50 million hits on YouTube since Monday, March 5. Leahy, chairman of the Senate’s budget panel for the State Department and Foreign Operations, is a longtime U.S. leader on issues relating to war crimes and criminals and the innocent victims of war and conflict. He recently included funding in the U.S. foreign aid budget to help Kony’s victims – many of them children -- and he has long supported efforts to capture Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has terrorized the people of northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa for more than two decades. The victim assistance funding secured by Leahy will be discussed in Leahy’s annual budget hearing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which will implement those efforts. Kony and his forces have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers and to kill and mutilate members of their own families. Adonga Quinto, a northern Ugandan who was kidnapped by the LRA, discusses his experiences. Also speaking, Sadie Stone, a Champlain College student who has joined the effort to bring Kony to justice.

Senator Patrick Leahy announces significant new funding for water quality, fisheries and ecosystem restoration work on Lake Champlain during the coming year. The federal dollars, just recently confirmed, are part of the FY2012 budget. Leahy is a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the funds he secures for Vermont have long been the main engine for cleanup efforts involving the Lake and its watershed.