Category: Uncategorized

Post Content

Post Content

If the Supreme Court rules against Joe Biden on student debt, it will be a major blow. But there is a more straightforward path for Biden to unilaterally forgive a lot of student debt.

A sign reading “Cancel Student Debt” is staged outside of the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, on February 28, 2023. (Sarah Silbiger for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

In August of last year, Joe Biden announced that he would be forgiving $10,000 worth of student debt for individuals with income below a certain level. The Biden administration claimed that a post-9/11 statute called the HEROES Act gave him this authority because it allows the president to modify student loans in response to a national emergency.

After he announced the policy, various individuals, organizations, and governments filed lawsuits trying to have the program halted. One of those suits has made it to the Supreme Court, and the court may decide on it soon. Many court-watchers and legal analysts believe that the Supreme Court is likely to conclude that Biden’s move is unconstitutional under the major-questions doctrine provided that the Supreme Court also concludes that the plaintiff in the case — a state-affiliated debt servicer in Missouri called MOHELA — has standing to sue.

If the Supreme Court rules against Biden, it will obviously be a major blow to the cause of student debt forgiveness. But there is another more straightforward legal path for Biden to unilaterally forgive a lot of student debt that does not rely upon expansive interpretations of a post-9/11 statute.

In the Higher Education Act (HEA), Congress has not just authorized, but directly mandated the Department of Education (DOE) to create income-driven repayment (IDR) programs for student loans. One of those programs, called income-based repayment (IBR), has its parameters specifically spelled out in the statute (20 USC 1098e). The other program, called income-contingent repayment (ICR), is just a general grant of authority to the DOE to create income-driven repayment programs with the parameters of its choosing (20 USC 1087e(e)).

The DOE has already created three IDR programs under this ICR authority: one called Income-Contingent Repayment, another called Pay As You Earn (PAYE), and a third called Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE).

Under these IDR programs, students must pay (1) a certain percent of their income (2) beyond a certain percent of the poverty line (3) for a certain number of years in order to receive debt forgiveness. These three parameters vary between the three programs and can be set pretty much wherever the DOE chooses to set them. The HEA contains some limits on how stingy the limits can be, but not how generous they can be.

When Biden announced his student debt forgiveness plan, he also announced a new ICR-based proposed rulemaking that got much less attention. Under the proposal, the REPAYE IDR program would be amended so that instead of forgiveness being provided to students after they have paid (1) 10 percent of their income (2) beyond 150 percent of the poverty line (3) for twenty years, they would instead be provided forgiveness after they have paid (1) 5 percent of their income (2) beyond 225 percent of the poverty line (3) for ten years if their original student loan balance was below $12,000 or twenty years if their original student loan balance exceeded $12,000.

In the long run, this change, if it is administered well, will actually forgive far more student debt than the $10,000 forgiveness that has gotten all of the attention and legal challenges. But the authority that allows Biden to make this change through regulation would also allow him to go much further.

On its face, there is no reason why Biden could not use this authority under the HEA to create a new IDR program that states, for example, that students will be eligible for debt forgiveness after they have paid 1 percent of their income beyond 100 percent of the poverty line for one year. This kind of change would forgive far more student debt than the change that is currently facing legal challenge.

To be sure, a new IDR program with these parameters will generate lawsuits, and you never know what any court will necessarily decide. But, unlike the current student debt forgiveness program that relies upon a heroic reading of the HEROES Act, this particular approach is based on a more straightforward use of authority granted under the HEA, authority that many presidents have used to increase the generosity of IDR options for student debtors.

Post Content

Post Content

Institutions can’t stop Donald Trump — but democratic politics can.

Donald Trump during an event at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, US, on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. (Bing Guan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Exactly eight years ago, a beaming Donald Trump made his way down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that he was seeking the Republican nomination for president. At the outset, no one in political or media officialdom took his candidacy seriously and, when it emerged a few days later that attendees had been paid $50 to come, the fundamental unseriousness of the Trump campaign was unanimously proclaimed. Throughout the ensuing weeks and months, as the candidate transgressed and insulted everyone around him, it was repeatedly assumed that the established conventions of politics would soon intervene and that the joke must be nearing its inevitable punch line.

But this cathartic denouement never came. Trump, as it turned out, could in fact make obscene comments about immigrants and rise higher in the polls. He could disparage John McCain and bully his various primary opponents. He could run afoul of the august National Review and pry the Republican nomination from the would-be gatekeepers of movement conservatism. He could even be heard on tape boasting about sexual assault and somehow win the presidency a month later. At every turn, people waited for an invisible barrier to impose itself or some indiscretion to finally go too far. Again and again, neither happened.

After Trump’s improbable victory, many turned to institutions for salvation. Perhaps the electors might be persuaded to change their votes and nullify this nightmare before it went any further. Maybe the Robert Mueller investigation would find irrefutable evidence of foreign collusion, or a Watergate-esque media scoop would discover the proverbial smoking gun. In the wake of the 2020 election, the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and the president’s subsequent impeachment and banishment from Twitter, it again seemed momentarily plausible that his goose might be cooked.

And yet. Just over two years later, the same pattern continues to recur. Despite the electoral disaster of last year’s midterms and two separate indictments, Trump maintains a resounding lead in the Republican primaries, and polls still suggest he’s running more or less even with Joe Biden.

In light of all this, perhaps it’s finally time to abandon the idea that there will ever be an institutional solution to the nightmare of Trumpism. Even if the former president is ultimately convicted, nothing will bar him from continuing to run for reelection from prison or disqualify him from taking the office for a second term should he somehow win.

Another electoral defeat might deflate Trump considerably, but the root causes of Trumpism — racism, soaring inequality and human desperation, mass alienation from political institutions, the devolution of politics into empty spectacle, the corrosive influence of organized money — would still remain unaddressed. This is why the antidote has always laid in the kind of popular democratic politics rejected by elites in both major parties. A feckless and technocratically minded liberalism can win occasional victories against a figure like Trump, but it has repeatedly failed to neutralize him.

In the short term, this conclusion would seem to have rather bleak implications. Barring some completely unexpected development, Trump very much looks poised to win the GOP presidential nomination again. Those currently praying for a judge or a prison sentence to finally bury Trumpism are almost certainly going to be disappointed. And expecting the Joe Biden–led Democratic Party to swing toward the populist left or suddenly rediscover the firebrand spirit of the New Deal era, offering American voters a positive political vision that could materially improve their lives rather than simply the negative message that Trump is bad, is a still more unlikely prospect.

Then again, there is also something liberating in the realization that Trumpism is not a malign force of nature that defies all understanding but a political phenomenon for which there are ultimately political solutions. Democracy, in the broadest sense, is the only thing that will ever make Trump, or anything resembling him, impossible beyond the narrow horizons of an individual election cycle.

There will, as a consequence, be no single defining event that finally consigns Trumpism to history’s dustbin. Instead, it will have to meet its demise through innumerable victories, large and small, on many different fronts and in many different theaters: electoral politics, popular legislative campaigns, labor organizing.

Daunting, yes. But also more realistic than waiting for the final intercession of an invisible referee that will never come.

As wildfires burn across Canada, the struggle to contain the damage has intensified for fire crews. The severe cuts to emergency fire services in recent years, driven by right-wing policies, have led to a failure to prepare for this crisis.

The ill-conceived cuts to emergency fire services have only exacerbated the challenges firefighters are facing in Canada as climate change causes ever more wildfires. (Lance McMillan / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Last week, as wildfires raged across Northern Ontario and smoke billowed south, fire crews struggled to contain the damage. Unfortunately, Canada’s right-wing provincial governments have failed to support these emergency workers in their crucial efforts due to cuts made to emergency fire services. As is so often the case, these cuts were driven by the Right’s relentless pursuit of “efficiencies” within provincial budgets.

In the eyes of Conservative provincial governments, emergency reserves are inefficient. That is, of course, until they’re desperately needed. The ill-conceived cuts to emergency fire services only exacerbated the challenges firefighters faced, further hindering their heroic efforts in battling the flames.

The Damage Done

Last week, across Canada, and much of the northeast United States, cities were surrounded by orange skies and apocalyptic plumes. Nova Scotia experienced a staggering escalation in its fire season. The record-breaking destruction of 3,390 hectares witnessed last year has been eclipsed by an even more devastating 22,000 hectares this year. In Quebec, over one hundred fires burned over 900,000 hectares. Ontario witnessed a significant surge in wildfires compared to the previous year. The number of wildfires doubled from 2022, while the area consumed by these fires soared from just over 2,000 hectares to a total of over 33,000 hectares. And, in Alberta and British Columbia, the fires have set new records. As the BBC observed: “Fires across Canada have already burned an area that’s 12 times the 10-year average for this time of year.”

All told, over one hundred thousand people have been forced to flee their homes. According to The Washington Post, should the fires continue to rage at their current pace the country will suffer the worst wildfire season in its recorded history and many more people will be displaced. “It is, in a word, sobering,” Canada’s natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson said.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the ministry of natural resources said, over the weekend, that there are sixty-eight wildfires burning across the north of the province. Evacuation orders have been issued across northern communities already and the anticipated rainfall, according to experts, is not expected to calm the fires.

Assigning Blame

Wildfires are stochastic — they are unpredictable and random. With forests covering roughly one-third of Canada’s landmass and a larger share of Ontario’s landmass, they happen and will continue to happen. But as climate change leads to increasingly hot and dry temperatures, they increase in frequency and intensity. As Nature summarized it recently: “Hot, dry weather and human carelessness have led to a huge burnt area — and to a choking haze that is affecting millions of people.”

Human carelessness often gives rise to wildfires, typically in the form of negligent campfires, smokers, and the like. Arguably, however, a much bigger factor in the recent spate of disastrous wildfires has been the utter carelessness of right-wing governments and the wealthy interests they represent.

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, blames campfires for the fire. But, as the opposition has noted, his government cut the province’s emergency firefighting budget by 67 percent — or $142.2 million in 2019 — and never restored the funding.

Ontario isn’t alone in this. In Alberta, cuts have been similar. The United Conservative Party government cut the wildfire budget from $130 million in 2018–19 to $100 million this year.

Even British Columbia’s nominally left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) government has been remiss in wildfire preparation. Although the government spent $801 million fighting forest fires in 2021’s summer wildfire emergency, this year the NDP budgeted only $32 million dollars for the permanent service.

Federally, too, budget cuts implemented by the 1990s Liberal government, as part of one of the deepest austerity programs in the industrialized world, also shrank the Canadian Forest Service’s staff size — from twenty-two hundred in the 1990s to seven hundred today. “People were mortified,” Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University, told the New York Times. “We have this situation that’s unfolding, this new fire paradigm, and the forest service’s just getting chump change to address it.”

All told, owing to past cuts, more than eleven hundred firefighters from around the world have been dispatched across Canada to help combat the country’s raging fire season. This including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Climate Change and Canada’s Forests

While the fires raged across Northern Ontario, forcing communities to evacuate, Ford denied any link between the crisis and climate change. “I’m actually in shock that the Leader of the Opposition is politicizing wildfires. It’s staggering, really,” Ford said. “But nothing surprises me with the opposition.”

Regardless of whether Ford acknowledges it, there exists a positive feedback loop between climate change and forest fires. Each fire releases the sequestered carbon from Canada’s vast forests, further exacerbating the impact of climate change.

Environment and Climate Change Canada have found that, from 2001–2016. Canada’s forests acted as “more as a source than a sink” of carbon. In British Columbia, the province’s extreme fire years, in 2017 and 2018 alone, each produced three times more greenhouse gases than all other sectors of the province combined.

“People sometimes say, ‘Is this the new normal?’ And the answer is unequivocally this is not the new normal,” says Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service said. “We’re on a trajectory of continuously worsening situations due to climate change.”

“Our emission reduction targets literally go up in smoke as a result of these wildfires,” he warns.

Elsewhere, researchers have observed a concerning trend: fires are causing lasting impacts on the composition of Canada’s boreal forests. The destruction of black spruce trees through burning is hindering their ability to regenerate and recover. Increasingly, as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) put it, wildfires are transforming these winter forests into savannas, with huge implications for biodiversity and carbon storage.

Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CBC News:

I would anticipate that what we’re seeing now is going to play out as really severe burning fires. […] We know that when a lot of organic matter — in the trees, but also on the ground in moss and peat layers — when a large amount of that is consumed during a fire, sites don’t regenerate back to what they were prior.

The Problem of Externalities

Ford’s failure to prepare Ontario for the current disaster is unsurprising. He is, after all, the same premier who vowed to do all he could to open up Ontario’s carbon-rich “Ring of Fire” — the mineral-rich peatland’s in the north of the province. Despite the sensitivity of the region, Ford is committed to developing it, vowing that, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads to the Ring of Fire.”

The premier has also worked with housing developers to expand construction into the province’s “greenbelt,” which serves as another massive carbon sink. In between, Ford has been actively cutting funding for health care, housing, and other vital social services, thereby increasing the vulnerability of working individuals and placing them at greater risk in the face of future crises.

The federal Liberal government, while paying lip service to the dangers of climate change, is little better in this regard. While doing all it can to greenwash its policies, for example, it has promoted massive offshore drilling projects, doled out ever-increasing subsidies to the country’s oil bosses and maintained roughly comparable cuts to federal emergency services.

In the lead up to the wildfires, Ford promised to find “efficiencies” in the public sector. In practice that has and will continue to mean cutting programs to reduce the “tax burden” on corporate profits. In the eyes of Ford and his party, it is too costly to maintain reserve funds “in case” of emergencies because those come at the expense of profit.

Notably, Ford has successfully garnered the support of the mining and construction industry leaders in the province. The shortsighted, profit-first calculus employed by Ford and his party jeopardizes the province’s ability to effectively respond to emergencies, such as the wildfires, leaving communities vulnerable and highlighting the prioritization of corporate interests over public welfare.

The urgency of combating wildfires in Canada necessitates a collective effort to challenge austerity measures and the erosion of essential public services, such as well-equipped and well-staffed firefighting teams and other emergency services. The preservation of robust public goods and community safety should take precedence over short-term gains. The last several weeks have vividly underscored the dire consequences that arise from neglecting these priorities, providing us with a stark glimpse into the potential nightmare that can ensue.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post In the Name of My Father. Happy Father’s Day, Dad! appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Pilot Incapacitation: Air Canada Flight ACA692 YYZ-YYT Toronto, ON to St. John’s, NL, First Officer Became Incapacitated on June 7, 2023 appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post First German Lawsuit Brought Against BioNTech Over COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects appeared first on Global Research.