$125 Billion Bomb to Drop

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Earlier this year, student loans and debts were being extended. For 2015 and beyond, the program success looks grim.

WASHINGTON — President Obama signed an executive order on Monday intended to lessen the college loan burden on nearly five million younger Americans by capping repayments at 10 percent of the borrowers’ monthly income. If you want to know the scale of student debt across the globe in countries like Sweden then you should go to https://studieskuld.se

Joined by indebted graduates in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama said the spiraling cost of higher education had put “too big a debt load on too many people.”

“These rising costs have left middle-class families feeling trapped,” he said. “You’ve got middle-class families who can’t build up enough savings, don’t qualify for support, feel like nobody’s looking out for them.”

Mr. Obama drew on his own financial history in promoting the measure. He told the audience that he and his wife, Michelle, paid off their law school loans just 10 years ago, after they had already begun saving for their daughters’ college educations.

The Hidden Student-Debt Bomb

Under the radar, maneuvers to avoid paying off loans are surging. ‘Forbearance’ has hit the $125 billion mark.

By Jason Delisle

It is time to re-evaluate how we measure the performance of student-loan programs—particularly whether borrowers are or are not meeting their obligations. The traditional measures of nonrepayment—delinquencies and defaults—might be fine for most types of loans, but not for outstanding student loans, nearly all of which are held or backed by the federal government. Lawmakers have provided students with options that let them punt on repayment without triggering delinquency or default. Lately, students have been availing themselves of those options at rising levels.

The forbearance benefit, for example, lets borrowers postpone payments for up to three years. By law, loan-servicing companies have a lot of discretion to grant forbearances, and getting one usually takes only a phone call on the part of the borrower. Some borrowers might have to complete a simple form and meet a payment-to-income test. But overall it is the easiest and fastest way for a borrower to suspend student-loan payments.

Forbearance can also cure the delinquency status on a loan, at least on paper. A borrower who misses a few payments, and is likely to miss more, will be informed by his loan-servicing company that he can obtain a forbearance right away. Payments cease and the loan is put in good standing. When the loan finally comes due, however, the monthly payment will be higher than the payment the borrower originally found too difficult to pay, thanks to accruing interest.

Forbearances are thus a double-edged sword. They help borrowers keep their loans in good standing, but they also mean borrowers aren’t making progress on paying down their debts—just the opposite. Enrollments in forbearances are really a negative indicator in the federal loan program, much like delinquency and default.

That is why the latest figures from the Education Department that show steady increases in forbearances are so alarming. Loan balances in forbearance were about 12.5% of those in repayment in 2006. In 2013, they were 13.3%. Today they are 16%, or $125 billion of the $778 billion in repayment.

If student-loan defaults exhibited that kind of growth it would make national headlines. Forbearance growth goes unmentioned, yet it looks a lot like a default given that the borrower isn’t making payments.

Another option is income-based repayment plans, which allow borrowers to suspend or reduce payments on their loans and will also cure a severely delinquent loan. The mechanics of these plans are a little complicated, but for borrowers with incomes below 150% of poverty, payments are zero. Borrowers who earn more than that make payments between 1% and 15% of their incomes. After 10, 20 or 25 years, depending on the program, the government forgives any outstanding balances and taxpayers eat the loss.

For many borrowers, income-based repayment works like long-term forbearance, or better if their debt is forgiven. Borrowers might have their payments suspended, or lowered to the point that they will never fully repay the loan before the outstanding balance is forgiven. In some cases the payments may not even cover the interest that accrues each month. The Obama administration estimated in 2012 that the average amount forgiven in income-based repayment plans will be $41,000 per borrower.

The Obama administration greatly expanded benefits under income-based repayment plans in recent years and has launched efforts to promote them. Enrollments are growing rapidly and now stand at an all-time high. Some 24% of Federal Direct Loan Program balances ($115 billion) that have come due are enrolled in the two most generous plans, Income-Based Repayment and Pay As You Earn. That is up from 14% a little more than a year ago. The number of borrowers using the plans has doubled over that time, to 2.2 million.

Despite more borrowers taking advantage of benefits to suspend and lower their payments, the share of borrowers in default is still trending upward. It now stands at 19.8% of borrowers whose loans have come due—some 7.1 million borrowers with $103 billion in outstanding balances. That’s the highest share since the Education Department began making the statistic available in 2013, and given other trends, it probably is a record high.

These trends are troubling because the U.S. economy has been improving for some time. Yet fewer and fewer borrowers are repaying their federal student loans. For those who do make payments, more of them are paying too little to retire the debt they took on.

This all makes sense, however, when you realize that the student-loan program has been designed to achieve two political goals: Loans should be available to any student, at any school, pursuing any credential; and student debt is bad and burdensome, so it should be easy for borrowers not to repay.

Based on these goals, the program is performing quite well for students and the institutions whose coffers swell under such loose lending standards. Loan issuance has grown rapidly in recent years while repayment rates have declined steadily. From the perspective of the taxpayers who must ultimately finance these liabilities, however, the federal student-loan program is performing badly and steadily getting worse. There are many reputable companies which can help you get out of student loan default. So if you need help, contact a company like Loan Forgiveness.

Obama is Selective on Human Rights Violators

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If Barack Obama was really true to his words, why not take on North Korea. The DPRK has operated gulags for 50 years where atrocities are beyond description and on par with Daesh (Islamic State).

‘Starvation food rations, forced labor, routine beatings, systematic torture and executions put the North Korean camps in the ranks of history’s worst prisons for political offenders. Originally modeled on the Soviet gulag, the North Korean camps have developed distinctive features of their own for which no terminology has yet been devised. Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents, in order to isolate them from society and punish them because of their relationship to family members accused of political crimes. Rooting out “class enemies for three generations” was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps. An equally horrifying practice distinctive to North Korea is forced abortion regularly carried out and in the most brutal manner on women prisoners who illegally crossed the border into China, became pregnant by Chinese men and were forcibly repatriated to North Korea. In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born. Still another point of departure in North Korea is that all the residents of the kwan-li-so are denied any correspondence, visits or life saving parcels from family and friends. They are totally incommunicado.’

• Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard, reported that all three of the kwan-li-so at which he worked had isolated detention facilities in which many prisoners died from mistreatment, and that at Kwan-li-so No. 22 there were so many deaths by beatings from guards that the guards were told to be less violent.

• Former Prisoner # 37 was beaten at the Onsong An-jeon-bu police facility during his six month interrogation prior to being tried and sentenced to Chongo-ri kyo-hwa-so for smuggling food back and forth from China.

• Seo Jin was beaten so badly with wooden staves at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, and again at the Musan Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, that she could hardly walk. After transfer to the Musan An-jeon-bu detention facility, she was beaten by younger women guards when she objected to her third vaginal examination. And she was kicked on the legs and beaten on the back by guards at the Oro Kyo-yang-so penitentiary No. 55 when she did not keep up the required pace in her prison labor.

• Former Prisoner # 31 was whipped with a belt by male guards at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation facility, and severely beaten on her legs and back when, because of severe malnutrition, she was unable to maintain the pace of her prison labor.

• Bang Mi-sun was severely beaten on her legs with a wooden stave because she could not keep up with the work pace at the Musan An-jeon-burun ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae mobile labor brigade owing to injuries she suffered while trafficked in China prior to her repatriation. Infection from this beating left her partially crippled. At the Musan An-jeon-bu pre-trial detention ku-ryu-jang, she and other prisoners were required to sit motionless for days, with fellow detainees forced to beat other detainees who moved.

For more testimony, documents and photos click here for the report.

Ed Schroeder’s Military Intelligence Report: North Korean Defector Details ‘Human Experiments’

by ****

Im Cheon-yong says that witnessing mentally and physically handicapped children being used in chemical weapons tests carried out by the North Korean military was the last straw.

An officer in North Korea’s special forces, Im had reservations about the nation in which he was living, and the regime that he served to the best of his abilities, but the “special training” he was required to undergo at a military academy in North Pyongan Province for the regime’s elite troops helped to convince him that he needed to defect.

“If you want to graduate from this academy, you need to learn how to confuse the enemy without revealing your own forces, how to carry out assassinations, how to use chemical weapons and so on,” he said.

‘The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth,’ says Shigemura

“And then we have what they call ‘field learning’. For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed ‘objects’,” he added. “At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died. Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes,” Im claimed.

He said he got repulsed by what he had witnessed and managed to get over the border into China and arrived in South Korea in the mid 1990s. Now 50 years old, Im is a prominent advocate of the regime change in Pyongyang and president of both the Soldiers’ Alliance for Free North Korea and The Fellowship Foundation for Freedom.

Abuse of citizens

Some North Korea experts say that Im’s experiences tally with other defectors’ tales of abuse of citizens of the world’s most isolated state. Some of that testimony was shared with the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry before it issued its damning report on the state of human rights in the North in February.

“There are too many of these stories now for them not to be true,” Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University, and an authority on North Korean affairs, told DW. “There were reports in the past but it was difficult to confirm them, but the testimony that is emerging now is consistent and from numerous sources,” he added.

“Anyone who goes to Pyongyang will notice that there are no disabled people about at all,” he said. “We now know that they are being taken away as children and incarcerated in special camps. The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth, and there can be no disabled people in paradise,” he said.

But Kim Myong-chol, executive director of The Centre for North Korea-US Peace, dismisses Im’s claims.

“It is the same nonsense,” he told DW. “This guy – and plenty of others like him – are just looking to make money by attracting the attention of South Korea and the US. That is why they make these lies up. People like him know nothing about the real North Korea and all they care about is making money from their lies.”

Experiments on humans

‘The authorities buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,’ claims Im

According to Im, experiments on humans date back to the late 1960s and one of the first facilities used for chemical and biological weapons tests on humans was constructed on the military controlled island of Mayang-do, just off the east coast port of Sinpo, which is also North Korea’s most important submarine base. A second facility was subsequently constructed on an island off the west coast of the peninsula, while a third is in operation alongside a political prison camp outside the city of Hyanghari, the defector claims.

“They use anthrax bacterium as well as 40 different types of chemical weapons that the regime has developed itself,” Im said. “Through these experiments, they know the effects of the weapons and the amounts to be used.”

To give the regime’s actions legitimacy, children born with mental or physical disabilities are not taken away by force – although, in reality, few citizens of North Korea have the right to resist the authorities’ will, says Im.

“They want to do it ‘legally’ and they don’t want to lose the support of the people, so they buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,” he said. “The officials say they will take care of the children.”

Boehner’s Office Tallying the Obama Lies

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One may really need a calculator to tabulate the lies from Obama, but at least a staffer has been assigned to keep current. While political correctness is part of the verbal DNA in Washington calling lies ‘Pinocchios’, one must understand that no legislator in decades has used the word ‘lie’ out of the whole political deference thing as lies and omissions are as common pork laden bills.

The State of the Union Speech is coming up, so keep your own tally for 2015.

The President’s Year in Pinocchios

December 31, 2014|Matt Wolking –

In 2013, President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” was named Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.” In 2014, amid a mountain of stumbles and scandals, his rhetoric wasn’t received any better.

In May, the White House claimed President Obama first heard about secret waiting lists and deaths at the VA on the news, despite evidence to the contrary. CNN’s Drew Griffin said this was absurd, and more of the administration’s sloppy spin prompted National Journal’s Ron Fournier to ask, “How Dumb Does Obama Think We Are?”

It was a prescient question considering comments made by frequent White House visitor and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, who said “the stupidity of the American voter” was “critical to getting the thing to pass” and bragged repeatedly about helping the president pull one over on the public. When asked about this, President Obama pretended he didn’t know that guy and denied misleading Americans about the law.

His unilateral action was another lowlight. President Obama said 22 times that he couldn’t ignore or create his own immigration law – and then he did. Just like his reasoning for rejecting the Keystone pipeline, his explanations for his flip-flop on executive action didn’t fool anyone.

And that was, of course, just one of these four things he hid from Americans until after the November election.

Looking back on 2014, from the continued cover-up of the IRS scandal, to all the president’s missing hard drives, to his dishonesty regarding the national debt, to the administration’s bogus ObamaCare enrollment numbers, there’s a clear pattern of hiding the truth and misleading Americans.

Indeed, fact checkers had a field day with President Obama this year. The Washington Post alone awarded him a total of 47 Pinocchios, plus one Upside-Down Pinocchio (the worst possible rating).

Here they are, in chronological order:

  • “Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
  • “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
  • “We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
  • “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
  • “Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
  • “[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress[.]” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
  • “I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
  • “At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
  • “When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/26/14)
  • “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
  • “If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money.  That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
  • “Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
  • “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
  • “If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are.  Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck.  That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
  • “Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
  • “We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
  • “Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside-Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
  • “Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
  • “If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/general/president-s-year-pinocchios#sthash.8H0npCgI.dpuf

Regulation Nation, Another 75,000 pages

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While the insatiable Obama White House “pen and phone” machine has been spewing costly and draconian regulatory edicts at a fast and furious pace since taking power six years ago, it seems that the Holiday season has featured an even larger than usual number of wild decrees. Late last month, for example, as Americans were occupied with Thanksgiving, the Obama administration emitted what has been widely decried as the most costly single regulation in American history.

The so-called “ozone rule,” which estimates suggest could cost as much as $270 billion per year and put millions of American jobs at risk under the guise of further regulating emissions of the natural gas, was formally put forward the day before Thanksgiving. Lawmakers decried the timing of the massive regulation, suggesting the scheme was released during the holidays so “stupid voters” — as ObamaCare’s architect infamously described the American people — would be distracted with other matters.

Another major regulation imposed by the Obama administration in recent weeks surrounds the so-called “coal ash” rule regulating waste produced by electricity generation. The new scheme, finalized shortly before Christmas, could cost over $20 billion. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), presumably the next chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, blasted the plot as “a continuation of the president’s war on fossil fuels.” Among other concerns, he said the new regulations would “make states and utility companies vulnerable to new regulatory costs and expensive litigation.”

Other costly regulations in the pipeline include the Obama EPA’s radical bid to severely curtail emissions of CO2. The natural gas, which makes up a fraction of one percent of all the “greenhouse” gases present naturally in the atmosphere, is exhaled by humans and is described by scientists as the “gas of life.” Still, the White House and the United Nations continue their outlandish campaign to demonize the essential molecule as “pollution,” even threating to shackle humanity to a draconian global CO2 regime under the guise of stopping “global warming.”

Next year, meanwhile, the Obama administration is plotting to unleash yet another deluge of federal regulations targeting everything from fracking to power plants. State governments, lawmakers, and citizens have been fighting back, but so far, the White House shows no signs of backing off or even slowing down the pace when it comes to devastating decrees to pummel the economy and the American taxpayer. More “climate” decrees are coming, too, with the White House even threatening to impose a UN carbon regime on America without obtaining Senate ratification.

Separately, as The New American reported this month, the Obama administration’s increasingly dangerous and anti-constitutional usurpations of power have been accelerating. Despite White House attempts to dupe the American people by claiming it has imposed fewer “executive orders” than previous presidents, the administration was recently exposed by USA Today concealing most of its unilateral decrees by calling them “presidential memoranda” instead of orders. Obama has issued more than any president in history, doing everything from purporting to change federal law to even attacking the American people’s God-given rights using illegitimate executive edicts.

With the sprawling regulatory leviathan growing perpetually more costly and oppressive, critics say the American people’s elected representatives and the courts must both take action. “Congress should examine how executive agencies are exceeding key authorities granted to them and both narrow the substantive grants that are most subject to abuse and improve administrative procedures on multi-billion dollar regulations,” wrote attorneys Todd Gaziano and Mark Miller with the pro-liberty Pacific Legal Foundation in a recent Forbes column about the need to regulate what constitutes a regulation. “Until then, the courts must police these two areas, particularly in the rulemaking context.”

While Republican lawmakers have become adept at loudly complaining about the administration’s non-stop executive power grabs and regulations on the campaign trail, so far, they have done virtually nothing to stop it. In fact, despite all of the promises to rein in the Obama administration’s “imperial” presidency if elected to Congress, victorious Republicans, who already dominated the House of Representatives, recently passed a massive spending bill fully funding virtually every decree the White House has spewed since coming to power through next September.

In other words, GOP lawmakers, sent to Washington by outraged voters in November to stop Obama, gave up their most powerful tool to restrain the administration for almost a full year — before the new members could be seated, and for no good reason. The solution to the growing regulatory lawlessness, though, remains simple: Congress can and should defund the decrees and the unconstitutional agencies behind them before Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America is complete. The complete article is here.

The Secret Back Channels to Putin

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Add sanctions. Remove sanctions. Amend sanctions. Call the old-timers, try anything. Why? Putin is on the rocks financially but remains defiant. Why is the White House attempting to reset relations again? Could it be that Russia has more clandestine missions planned that includes the Baltic States or Europe?

(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised New Year’s address on Wednesday that the “return home” of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula to Moscow’s control would forever remain an important chapter in Russia’s history.

Putin is facing the biggest challenge of his 15-year rule as the Russian economy is sliding sharply into recession, hurt by Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and falling prices for oil, Russia’s chief export.

***

Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia

By

President Barack Obama’s administration has been working behind the scenes for months to forge a new working relationship with Russia, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in repairing relations with Washington or halting his aggression in neighboring Ukraine.

This month, Obama’s National Security Council finished an extensive and comprehensive review of U.S policy toward Russia that included dozens of meetings and input from the State Department, Defense Department and several other agencies, according to three senior administration officials. At the end of the sometimes-contentious process, Obama made a decision to continue to look for ways to work with Russia on a host of bilateral and international issues while also offering Putin a way out of the stalemate over the crisis in Ukraine.

“I don’t think that anybody at this point is under the impression that a wholesale reset of our relationship is possible at this time, but we might as well test out what they are actually willing to do,” a senior administration official told me. “Our theory of this all along has been, let’s see what’s there. Regardless of the likelihood of success.”

Leading the charge has been Secretary of State John Kerry. This fall, Kerry even proposed going to Moscow and meeting with Putin directly. The negotiations over Kerry’s trip got to the point of scheduling, but ultimately were scuttled because there was little prospect of demonstrable progress.

In a separate attempt at outreach, the White House turned to an old friend of Putin’s for help. The White House called on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to discuss having him call Putin directly, according to two officials. It’s unclear whether Kissinger actually made the call. The White House and Kissinger both refused to comment for this column.

Kerry has been the point man on dealing with Russia because his close relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represents the last remaining functional diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow. They meet often, often without any staff members present, and talk on the phone regularly. Obama and Putin, on the other hand, are known to have an intense dislike for each other and very rarely speak.

In several conversations with Lavrov, Kerry has floated an offer to Russia that would pave the way for a partial release of some of the most onerous economic sanctions. Kerry’s conditions included Russia adhering to September’s Minsk agreement and ceasing direct military support for the Ukrainian separatists. The issue of Crimea would be set aside for the time being, and some of the initial sanctions that were put in place after Crimea’s annexation would be kept in place.

“We are willing to isolate the issues of Donetsk and Luhansk from the issue of Crimea,” another senior administration official told me, naming two regions in Eastern Ukraine under separatist control. “If there was a settlement on Donetsk and Luhansk, there could be a removal of some sanctions while maintaining sanctions with regard to Crimea. That represents a way forward for Putin.”

Meanwhile, Kerry has been proposing increased U.S.-Russian cooperation on a wide range of international issues. Earlier this month, he invited Lavrov to a last-minute diplomatic confab in Rome to discuss the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After one meeting with Lavrov in Paris in October, Kerry announced that he had discussed potential U.S.-Russian cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Yemen. But the apparent warming was overshadowed by Lavrov’s quick denial of Kerry’s claim that Russia had agreed to assist in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Iraq.

Kerry has seemed more enthusiastic about mending ties with Russia than Obama himself. After the president gave a blistering critique of Russian behavior in a major United Nations speech, saying that “Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition,” Kerry urged Lavrov to ignore his boss’s remarks, according to Lavrov. “Kerry said we have so many serious things to discuss that of course that was unfortunate, let’s not focus on that,” Lavrov told Russian reporters.

State Department officials insist that Kerry is clear-eyed about the challenges of trying to work with Russia, but that he believes there is no other responsible option than to see what can be accomplished.

“Secretary Kerry is not advocating internally or with Russia for a reset in the relationship, and in fact in meetings he has taken a strong and at times skeptical stance,” one senior State Department official told me. “As the nation’s chief diplomat he is simply always exploring ways to make relationships more productive.”

There is also a belief among many both inside the State Department and the White House that sanctions are working. The Russian economy is tanking, albeit due largely to collapsing oil prices and not targeted punishments. One senior administration official argued that absent the sanctions, Putin might have been even more aggressive in Ukraine. Moreover, this official said, the sanctions need time to work and might yet prove to have greater effect on Putin’s decision-making in the months ahead: “We’ll see how they feel as their economy continues to deteriorate and the Ukrainian economy refuses to collapse.”

If the Russians are getting ready to cave, they aren’t showing it. Putin remains defiant and Russian military assistance to the Ukrainian rebels continues. The Russian leadership has been rejecting Kerry’s overtures both in public and private. Diplomatic sources said that Lavrov has refused to even discuss Kerry’s conditions for partial easing of sanctions. And Putin has made a hobby of bashing the U.S. in public remarks.

To many of the administration’s critics, especially Republicans on Capitol Hill, pursuing engagement with Moscow is based on naivety and wishful thinking.

“It’s a strategy worthy in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain,” incoming Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain told me. “I think the Russians are doing fine. Meanwhile, what price has Vladimir Putin paid? Very little.”

The legislative branch has also been active on Russia this year, but its efforts run counter to the administration’s policy and sometimes have the indirect effect of putting more roadblocks in front of the Obama-Kerry push to find a way forward.

On Dec. 18, Obama reluctantly signed a bill authorizing new Russia sanctions and military aid to Ukraine that was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Afterward, the White House awkwardly said that the legislation did not signify any change in policy.

And this week, the State Department sanctioned four more Russian officials, but not over Ukraine. The officials were added to a list of human rights violators under the Sergei Magnitsky Act of 2012, named after the anti-corruption lawyer who died in a Russian prison. In response, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement saying that the Magnitsky Act sanctions “place in question the prospects for bilateral cooperation in resolving the situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear program, the Syrian crisis, and other acute international issues.”

These latest punishments show that it may be impossible to de-link the problems in the bilateral relationship from the opportunities, as the Obama administration wants to do. They also show that there will always be chances for those in Washington and Moscow who want to stoke the tensions to do so, jeopardizing any progress.

Some experts believe that any plan to warm U.S.-Russian relations is unlikely to succeed because it doesn’t have the full support of either president.

“It’s very clear that between the Putin Kremlin and the Obama White House there is a very bad chemistry. Its not a question of simply distrust, it’s a question of intense dislike between the two leaders,” said Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest.

Also, some experts feel, placing the diplomacy in the Kerry-Lavrov channel dooms its outcome, because the Russians know that Kerry himself has no power to make major decisions and Lavrov has to be careful not to be seen as cozying up to the U.S.

“The more Kerry creates a perception he has a special relationship with Lavrov, the more he puts Lavrov in a difficult position with officials in his own capital, starting with Putin,” said Simes. “It’s clear that when Kerry deals with Lavrov and hopes that because they have overlapping interests, that would allow cooperation where useful, that is not a model of relationship that Putin is prepared to accept.”

Obama has made it clear that in his last two years in office he is prepared to make big moves on foreign policy even if they face political or legislative opposition, such as normalizing relations with Cuba or pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. But when it comes to Russia, he is unwilling to place his own credibility behind any outreach to his nemesis Putin.

The administration’s cautious engagement with Moscow is logical: Why not seek a balance in a complicated and important bilateral relationship? But by choosing a middle ground between conciliation and confrontation — not being generous enough to entice Russia’s cooperation yet not being tough enough to stop Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe — Obama’s policy risks failing on both fronts.