And the working class gets the shaft yet again

  • m532@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    So their “supreme court” has the highest power in yankeeland… but the people inside there, how do they get in? I’ve never heard about a “supreme court election”. Do they just plant their children in there, monarchy style?

    • comrade_nomad@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 years ago

      President nominates people and congress has a hearing and either confirms or rejects them.

      So, yea essentially except usually it isn’t their kids but rather people that have written enough legal opinions that they like and can bribe

  • Munrock ☭@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    Western Democracy is when you give your little brother the unplugged console controller so he stops asking you for a turn. And he sits there like an idiot pressing the buttons thinking he’s in control.

    Sometimes he starts to get suspicious, so you tell him he needs to press the buttons harder. Then you look over at which buttons he’s straining himself on and follow along for a bit until he thinks he’s making a difference again (but never in a part of the game that actually matters of course).

    The difference is, with Western Democracy you’ve got a chorus of commentators sitting behind your brother telling him he’s in control, applauding or criticising accordingly, telling him he’s being silly when he gets suspicious, and moving hell and high water to keep him distracted when he starts following the controller cable to see where it really leads.

  • RedTed@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    This is bad of course but must remember that this debt forgiveness was a dumb half assed plan from the start. Systematic change is the only thing that will help the working class.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 years ago

      Better then nothing. 20k can change peoples lives, forget that it’s half baked, any measure to help the proletarian is good.

      • jkure2@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 years ago

        Yeah agree, but they intentionally chose a long and winding path to get it done, one which allowed republicans to file an inevitable legal challenge. Undoubtedly this wasn’t literally purely to sell out student debtors (i.e. me) for just pure malice, but instead they were thinking this is a nice middle path where we’re not too radical but also standing by our commitment (a commitment that itself was a climb down from his previous commitments).

        The effect, however, is the same. The best path was to immediately forgive the debt and force the court to claw it back, rather than to just nullify something that didn’t truly exist yet. They chose this path knowing this was the likely outcome, but preferred it to something more radical that had a higher chance of success. I am not clear on the legal (let alone extra legal) paths available if the court is truly determined to even claw back the money, but they haven’t been playing to win from the start.

        Because when you have a bourgeois class of elected officials, consultants, lobbyists, and various other hangers on, they lose 100% of whatever genuine enthusiasm and connection they had to the rank and file of the party. It’s no different than the SPD in 1915, only even less radical and more doomed to fail

  • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    The woman who sued to have this struck down took a PPP loan worth $48,000 from the government. She then had all but $4 forgiven, after which she proceeded to sue against student loan forgiveness which would of forgiven 20k of federal loans, and 10k of private loans.

    Ghouls

    • RedTed@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 years ago

      Small business tyrants have been looting the treasury for the last three years. You would not believe the amount of free money given to some of these ghouls. $48k is nothing compared to what I’ve seen.

      • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 years ago

        The average loan size was 250,000. 5-50 million was also very common.

        Massive corporations also got absurd quantities of money.

    • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 years ago

      Honestly, part of me wonders if that’s not the case. Can’t tell me Empire doesn’t want to bring back debt slavery.

  • iriyan@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    Now wait a damn minute. It is not just the working class that owes loans for schooling, one may say the lowest economic class in the US made the least use of student loans, it is the middle class that benefitted the most. Kids that got out of public school and went straight to work, either in factory, construction, etc. made very little use of those loans. On the other hand some who did get loans may have used them as capital to escape work and are now well off, just didn’t feel like paying.

    The populist right invested in this reality and got a significant part of the real working class who never saw a student loan to “rightfully” say if you are going to donate 30-50.000 to others why not give me just as much too?

    The neoliberal nightmare (Biden) as brother/comrade Manning Marable called him (in contradiction to the “neo-fascist disaster” Trump) invested in appealing to this lower middle class of managerial stuff and their kids, to give them a gift so he can get elected. And he did probably on this promise for a gift himself. He may have known it wouldn’t legally make it all the way so it was a cheap promise to make. Who knows what’s next from this war-monger constitution abolitionist (covid violations of constitutional human rights).

    The 1.2 trillion of fake dollars printed and distributed wasn’t illegal, corporations sucked it all up, but loan wavers are, because they are not for everyone’s benefit.

    EDIT: To go to a short term trade school to get a license or certificate within months (such as CDL driver’s license) only costs a few thousands in loans and mostly the payments of were made sortly after by an employer. To go through university and graduate education loans could easily reach 50+ k$, for which an MBA could graduate, start an Inc. consulting/accounting/financing and as a person can have unpaid loans while their business could be bringing millions. Truck driver got 3000, and it was paid 6-9mos after first job. Golf-club life member owes $100k with penalties and interest and doesn’t care, it was government guaranteed and nobody is chasing to throw him in prison.

    • LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.mlBanned
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      3 years ago

      What on earth is “the middle class”? Some kind of British tabloid term?

      Reading on… what is the “lower middle class”?