For the last 50 years, since Richard Nixon’s presidency the Republican Party has sought to protect White Christian privilege because social research showed that America was going to become a majority-minority nation and the Republicans realized that White Christians would lose their protected status. By the late 1970s the strategy emerged to achieve this protection by doing two things. First, rewrite the country’s tax structure so that oligarchs could become the dominant financiers. Second, to take over the nation’s judicial system, particularly the Supreme Court, so that christofascists could determine how laws were interpreted no matter what the Congress did. To achieve their goals the christofascist on 23 April 1982 created the Federalist Society, and in 2010 they scored a major success with the Citizens United decision, which legalized bribery by the White rich, and the corporations they controlled. Now we have come to today’s decision which makes it clear that the Supreme Court is now a kind of unelected super-legislature. Six individuals, three of whom on the basis of evidence are grossly corrupt, one of whom is the product of a White supremacy, male dominant, christofascist cult, and at least two who have been the focus of serious charges of sexual predation now tell the 331 million Americans how their country will be run.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court canceled the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program on June 30. Credit: Win McNamee / Getty
If you were counting on loan forgiveness — and Biden’s loan forgiveness program would have forgiven $10,000 worth of loans for most student borrowers, and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients — you will not receive it because of a decision the Court handed down on Friday, in a 6-3 vote entirely along party lines.
To his great credit learning of the appallingly bad Supreme Court decision from the MAGAt majority concerning college loans, President Biden immediately stepped up and offered an alternative that gets around the court’s decision. It is described here. What I find very interesting is that a large percentage of Americans don’t seem to appreciate or give credit to Biden and the Democrats for trying to foster wellbeing in their lives, while the MAGAts are trying to take the country back to about 1910 and destroy almost a century of social policies that foster wellbeing. When I went to the University of Virginia the tuition fee was $238 a semester, and student debt was almost unheard of. Today the average 4-year Bachelor’s degree debt from a public college is $32,714. 64% of students seeking a Bachelor’s degree from a public 4-year college have student loan debt. The average 4-year Bachelor’s degree debt from a private for-profit college is almost twice that, $59,701. Personally, I can’t imagine what it must be like to be 21 years old, just graduating, looking for a job, and facing somewhere between 33 to 60 thousand dollars in debt. I think this is one of the reasons fewer young people are going to college, which means in the near future we, as a people, will be less educated, and more easily manipulated by politicians. It is almost exactly the reverse of what America has meant and sought to be for over 200 years.
President Biden announcing his Plan B on student debt.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to reject President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan Friday, the president announced the “new path” he will take to attain his goal of relieving “as many borrowers as possible.”
The high court, in a 6-3 ruling, struck down the plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt, arguing the president “had no right to cancel that debt.”
Prior to the president’s announcement, Business Insider reports U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said, “Today, I am urging the Biden Administration to implement a Plan B immediately to cancel student debt for tens of millions of Americans who are struggling to pay the rent, put food on the table, and pay for the basic necessities of life. Despite this legally unsound Supreme Court decision, the President has the clear authority under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to cancel student debt. He must use this authority immediately.”
Biden followed suit, announcing the “Plan B” he believes is the next […]
This legislation by the MAGAt cabal on the Supreme Court is so awful it is hard to believe any honest court could issue such a decision. But, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court is not an honest court it is a kind of unelected super-legislature. Most Americans don’t seem to realize that this decision is based on bogus evidence presented by a woman who, at the time, didn’t even have a wedding web service, she just thought it might be a good idea. So she was not actually hurt, which in an honest court, would be a requirement to even hear her case. When you read this decision it is clear that this whole case was deliberately constructed to give the MAGAt cabal a way to rule against LGBTQ folk. But the implications are far broader than that as we are going to see in the months to come. Frankly, I don’t understand why there are not millions of people out in the streets demonstrating against the pseudo-supreme court we now have.
Lorie Smith speaks to reporters outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2022. Credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
Businesses can refuse to serve same-sex couples if doing so would violate the owners’ religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
Why it matters: The court has significantly expanded LGBTQ rights over the past several years, but is now carving out some exceptions.
Driving the news: The case concerns Lorie Smith, a Colorado web designer who wanted to create and sell wedding websites, but not to same-sex couples.
Colorado’s civil rights law prohibited her, or any business that serves the general public, from turning away customers because of their sexual orientation. She said complying with that law would force her to espouse views she does not agree with.
“The artwork that I create is speech,” Smith told Colorado Public Radio in December, adding that, “those messages must be consistent with my convictions.”
The big picture: The conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Smith, saying she has a First Amendment right to refuse to design custom wedding […]
If you are a regular reader you may remember my paper on “Consciousness and The Weaponization of Lies” (see SR archive). Well, now the well-respected think tank, the Rand Corporation, has reached the same conclusions. This pandemic of malicious deliberate disinformation is how the MAGAt world was created. Here is Rand’s take on this critically important issue that is damaging our country so badly.
America’s troubled relationship with facts is putting national security at risk. A recent RAND paper warned that “Truth Decay”—the diminishing role of facts and analysis in public life—could weaken our military, costs us credibility with our allies, and calls into question our ability to respond to the next big crisis.
Experts from across RAND described Truth Decay as a “huge vulnerability,” an “obvious one,” “a strong weapon” in the hands of our adversaries. Yet the full extent of the damage we are doing to ourselves is only just beginning to come into focus.
“We’re stuck in a cycle,” said Caitlin McCulloch, an associate political scientist at RAND who coauthored the paper. “Polarization is feeding into Truth Decay, Truth Decay is feeding into polarization, and round and round we go. The harm that cycle is doing to our national security has not been fully explored.”
Truth Decay is more than just a fact-free rant on cable television or a conspiracy theory bouncing around social media. RAND uses the term to describe a society pulling apart over basic facts, with opinion […]
