2023 Archives

Student debt is a crime, weakening our intellectual infrastructure while maintaining and rigidifying racial and class caste systems inherited from the eras of slavery and indenture... Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just killed President Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness program. Republicans, predictably, are giddy, celebrating another Supreme Court victory in which, on behalf of their neofascist billionaire owners, they’re again “owning the libs.” They’re ecstatic that poor and working class people — particularly Black women who, as ABC News noted, “hold nearly two-thirds of the nearly $2 trillion outstanding student debt in the U.S.” — will find it ever harder to climb into the middle class, which increasingly requires a college degree.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Republicans on the Supreme Court tell students to go screw themselves. — Are lunch counters denying service to Black people next? — Stochastic terror is their strategy, just like it was for the Nazis before them. — Geeky Science: Democracy prevailed in the Americas long before Europeans showed up. — Crazy Alert! Imprisonment for peeing your pants?

As President Biden said, “We can't take democracy for granted any longer. … Make no mistake. Democracy is on the ballot...” NBC News reported this week that Trump is not only still leading the GOP field, but that his margin is growing: “Former President Donald Trump has expanded his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Republican presidential field since Trump’s latest indictment on federal criminal charges, according to a new national NBC News poll.” Another national survey, reported by NBC on Monday, shows a tossup in a Trump-Biden matchup; Biden’s small lead is within the margin of error. All of which raises the question: what would America be like if Trump or a similarly fascist Republican were to take the White House in 2024? What would the dire warnings about American fascism, were they realized, mean in real life?

Red states are mooching off the Blue states, using that essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke...” America is rapidly bifurcating — becoming two nations — and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.” Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy. In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and later Southern US tradition of a patriarchal, hierarchical society run by male kings, nobles, plantation masters, and wealthy churchmen, with all the work done by serfs, slaves, women, or impoverished wage-slaves.