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“For the past several decades, both courts have been acting as super legislatures,” Zack Smith, of Heritage Foundation, told JNS of the Israeli and U.S. Supreme Courts.

By Bradley Martin, JNS

In recent weeks, U.S. President Joe Biden called the Supreme Court ruling that he lacked the authority to waive student debt “wrong,” adding, “This fight is not over.” When the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in higher education is unconstitutional, Biden said, “This is not a normal court.”

“We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word,” Biden added. Vice President Kamala Harris said another recent Supreme Court decision “threatens future progress.”

The Biden administration has often stated that “trust in our democracy and democratic institutions” is essential. “Toxic polarization is increasing across society and Americans’ trust in institutions and in one another is decreasing,” it stated in December 2021.

H.R.3422, the Judiciary Act of 2023, which seeks to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 12 judges, has drawn 63 signatures since it was introduced nearly two months ago. It and the way Biden and Democrats talk about the Supreme Court threaten democratic institutions more than does Israeli judicial reform, which Biden and his administration target frequently.

“Packing the U.S. Supreme Court would do far more to undermine the judiciary than the judicial reforms proposed by Israel,” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor emeritus and prominent litigator and commentator, told JNS.

‘Breathtaking’ usurpation

Zack Smith, a legal fellow and manager of the Supreme Court and appellate advocacy program at The Heritage Foundation, told JNS that the justices which former President Donald Trump appointed to the U.S. high court and the judicial reforms underway in Israel seek to return the systems to interpreting law as written.

“For the past several decades, both courts have been acting as super legislatures,” he said. “In both cases, the political left were getting policy outcomes from the courts when they could not do so through the legislature.”

Smith cited the decision in Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade after 50 years, as an example of Trump Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett rectifying instances where the court overstepped its bounds and returning decisions to the hands of the legislature.

“In Israel, the Supreme Court has usurped power to a breathtaking extent,” Smith said.

He told JNS that Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, saw Israel’s Basic Laws as a constitution, in a “constitutional revolution” that granted the court unprecedented power to overrule elected government officials.

“The reforms in Israel are meant to bring the court back to its proper role in interpreting the law as it is written and to stop engaging in judicial activism,” Smith said.

‘Doing nothing is not an option’

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), one of the initial signatories of the legislation that aims to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, told JNS that the court faces “a legitimacy crisis of its own making.”

She said the court faces “numerous ethics scandals” and said its recent decisions “have become dangerously unmoored from any reasonable principles of legal analysis and transparently serve conservative interests.”

“It’s clear doing nothing is not an option,” she told JNS. “We need to reform and expand the court. I am proud to be an original co-sponsor of the judiciary act, which would restore confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court and ensure it reflects our nation’s principles and core beliefs.”

Neither Smith, nor fellow bill co-sponsors Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), responded to JNS queries about how their efforts to “pack” the court ought to be seen in light of criticism from Democrats of Israeli judicial reform.

Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and founder of the Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS that the two situations are not comparable.

The U.S. Supreme Court has become “radically interventionist,” according to Mellman. Democrats are pushing to add four seats to the court in light of its recent decisions on abortion and affirmative action, he added.

“The Supreme Court lost legitimacy in the eyes of the American public,” Mellman said.

Unlike in Israel, the U.S. Supreme Court is part of a system of checks and balances, with three co-equal, federal government branches. That makes it harder to pass legislation that is at odds with any of the three, Mellman said.

Mellman said packing the U.S. high court is unlikely.

“My understanding is that President Biden is not supportive of expanding the court,” he said. “This is unlikely to happen without his support.”

The post As they attack Israeli judiciary reform, Biden, Democrats undermine US Supreme Court appeared first on World Israel News.

Media reports thousands – not hundreds of thousands and not even tens of thousands – at daytime protest events across the country.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Over the past several months, hundreds of thousands of protesters against the Netanyahu government’s judicial reforms have been demonstrating every Saturday night and often in between, including more than one “Day of Disruption” that caused chaos throughout the country.

Talks between the two sides, mediated by President Isaac Herzog, failed, and on Monday night, the Knesset advanced a bill to restrict the ‘reasonableness’ standard by the Supreme Court by a vote of 64-56.

Opposition MKs and prominent activists had threatened to shut down the country the following day, having organized a “Day of Resistance” to the reforms. Protest groups released a statement pledging to “stop the country from functioning.”

However, the size of the daytime protests appears to have been smaller than anticipated. Despite the disruptions, such as the standstill in traffic on all major highways throughout the country and the ruckus at Ben-Gurion Airport, media has reported thousands of protesters in Tel Aviv and other cities – a modest number compared to previous demonstrations that attracted hundreds of thousands.

According to the Jewish News Syndicate, while police would not provide estimates to JNS on the number of protesters, there appeared to be significantly fewer participants than in previous demonstrations held over the past few months.

The number increased significantly in the evening, as tens of thousands reportedly packed Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, as usual, but nothing out of the ordinary happened..

The post ‘Day of Resistance’: How many protesters actually showed up? appeared first on World Israel News.

Readers deserve better than an article claiming to give background on Jenin that erases Palestinian terrorism, its Israeli victims, and the real reasons behind Israel’s military operation.

By Simon Plosker, Honest Reporting

The Washington Post’s “What is happening in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, and why now?” only ensures readers don’t know what’s happening or why Israel launched its recent military operation in Jenin.

According to journalists Niha Masih and Miriam Berger: “The military incursion on July 3 and 4 into the Jenin camp left 12 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier dead and hundreds of residents injured, displaced thousands more, and destroyed roads and infrastructure throughout the urban slum.”

Who were these 12 Palestinians? The Post fails to mention that all of them were combatants. Despite the IDF’s statement to that effect and Palestinian terror organizations claiming all of the 12, this relevant information does not appear in what is meant to be a backgrounder.

As for the “destroyed roads and infrastructure,” the article fails to note that the destruction resulted from the IDF having to use heavy bulldozers to address the roadside bombs and other ordinances planted by Palestinian terrorists, who deliberately turned civilian areas into military infrastructure, such as a weapons storage facility in a mosque.

The Washington Post does, however, note that “U.N. experts described the Jenin operation as ‘collective punishment‘ for the Palestinian people, amounting to ‘egregious violations of international law.’”

Who are these so-called UN “experts?” They happen to be led by none other than Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who has been widely condemned for antisemitism,  sympathizing with terror organizations, dismissing Israeli security concerns, and comparing Israelis to Nazis.

‘Hub of Resistance’

The Post fails to mention that the overwhelming majority of the “more than 150 Palestinians killed by Israelis this year” were either combatants or members of terrorist organizations. It then states: “Palestinian fighters say they need arms to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation and military incursions into the camp, during which Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed.”

But Palestinian terrorists in Jenin have used their arms not “to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation,” but to launch more than 50 attacks on Israelis, both in the West Bank and inside Israel, aimed mainly at civilians.

The Post also fails to mention the 27 Israelis murdered by Palestinians since the beginning of 2023, nearly all of whom have been civilians.

The “military incursions into the camp” are the direct result of these terror attacks, prompting the IDF to root out the nest of terrorism. Tragically, children have been killed but the Post fails to mention that some of these minors were 16 and 17-year-old combatants, sent by terrorist organizations to be used as child soldiers.

Instead, without the context of the Palestinian wave of terror that necessitated military action, the Post simply says that “Since last spring, the Israeli military has been launching near-daily raids on Palestinian villages and towns; its operations in Jenin have been among the most brazen and deadly.”

Indeed, Palestinian terrorism is remarkably absent from the Washington Post’s historical overview. Jenin is, according to the Post, “known as a hub of armed Palestinian resistance.”

The sad reality is that Jenin is known as a hub of terrorism dominated by terror organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, proscribed by most Western states. Their stated aims to murder Israelis and Jews and destroy Israel in its entirety are not simply “resistance” as the Post claims.

‘Clamping Down’ on Palestinians

Referring to the Oslo Accords, the backgrounder contends: “Instead of Palestinian statehood, fighting continued. Israeli forces retook control of the [Jenin] camp for more than one week in 2002, during a deadly raid that leveled much of the camp as part of a wider clampdown.”

Fighting did not simply continue after Oslo. Israelis were subjected to a massive campaign of Palestinian terrorism, including deadly suicide bombings that finally forced the Israeli government to launch Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. This was not a “wider clampdown” but a military operation to restore security for Israeli civilians who were being killed and injured on a near daily basis.

The Washington Post’s theme of erasing Palestinian terrorism from the Israeli motivation to deal with Jenin continues: “Once-fringe Jewish supremacists and settler activists now have key roles in Netanyahu’s government overseeing policing and policies concerning Palestinians and the West Bank. Netanyahu, who needs to stay in power to fight corruption charges, is under increasing political pressure to clamp down on Palestinians.”

So, in the Post’s eyes, the violence is a result not of Palestinian terrorism (that predated this Israeli government) but of simple politics, and “pressure to clamp down on Palestinians.” It falsely claims the target is not Palestinian terrorism but Palestinians in general, adding an additional layer of malevolence to Israeli government motivations.

Where the Post does eventually mention Palestinian terrorism, it does so in the context of a false moral equivalence between attacks on Israeli civilians and Israeli responses. A Palestinian car-ramming attack in Tel Aviv and Hamas rockets fired from Gaza are part of a “familiar tit-for-tat [that] accompanied Israel’s attacks on Jenin.”

Washington Post readers deserve better than an article claiming to give background on Jenin that erases Palestinian terrorism, its Israeli victims, and the real reasons behind Israel’s military operation.

The post Washington Post erases Palestinian terrorists, strips context from IDF’s Jenin operation appeared first on World Israel News.

Mainstream economists claim that we can only cure inflation if workers and the poor have less to spend. Instead, we need to think outside the box — by turning to tax-funded wealth redistribution and limits on profiteering.

A store worker serves a customer in the fruit and vegetable section at Paddy’s Market on October 22, 2022 in Sydney, Australia. (Lisa Maree Williams / Getty Images)

After twelve increases to the interest rate since May 2022, Australia’s cost-of-living crisis is reaching a boiling point. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), whose board sets the rate, these increases are to tackle inflation. However, thanks to landlords and banks who have passed on higher interest rates in the form of rent and mortgage repayment increases, renters and mortgage holders are feeling the impact most.

Much of the media — not to mention the RBA — justify this, by arguing that rising wages are a key driver of inflation. But this is contradicted by the RBA’s own research, which forecasts a considerable decline in real wages over the coming years. Indeed, while addressing the impact of the rate rises on living standards, RBA governor Philip Lowe may have conceded that their real rationale has less to do with wages or incomes than the bank would like us to believe. As he explained, “If people can cut back spending, or in some cases find additional hours of work, that would put them back into a positive cash flow position.” Ostensibly, the point of increased interest rates is to cut consumer spending. But if the Reserve Bank’s move encourages workers to work longer hours or find a second job, the implication is that the bank’s more genuine concern is to make workers foot the bill for bringing down inflation.

Either way, the situation poses an urgent question for the Left: How can we alleviate the cost-of-living crisis and deal with inflation, without forcing workers and the poor to shoulder the burden?

Greedflation

The current inflation crisis is in part the result of a series of very specific intersection between different world events. Global supply chains are still recovering from the impact of the pandemic on manufacturing, transport, and distribution networks. At the same time, severe weather events have wiped out crops, disrupting food production and driving up prices on some items. And the ongoing war in Ukraine — as well as and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia —  have caused significant disruption in Russian gas exports and Ukrainian grain exports.

However, there’s another, more important factor underlying inflation: profiteering. A wide range of companies have chosen to raise the price of their goods substantially above any underlying rise in costs. This can be seen in the fact that these companies’ profits have grown substantially above their growth in turnover, which suggests they have used external factors to conceal price gouging.

Economist Isabella Weber has described this as “greedflation.” Indeed, the European Central Bank, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and International Monetary Fund have flagged excessive profits as a cause of inflation.

Despite this, central banks around the world have sought to curb inflation by raising interest rates. Ideally, these measures would put the brakes on some sectors, like the stock market and housing market, without necessarily disrupting the economy overall. However, for most working people, these rate rises are potentially catastrophic, as are their impacts on the economy. Many are being forced to skip meals, default on mortgages or face eviction.

Stagnant Wages

Prior to the current crisis, wages in advanced countries had already been stagnant for some time. This is the result of two key developments.

First, harsh, anti-union industrial relations regimes have weakened the power of workers and their unions, while removing restrictions on employers, considerably strengthening their bargaining power. Second, employers have taken the opportunity to pursue an increasingly aggressive approach to bargaining and wage-setting. This change in approach was also a response by employers to historically low profit growth.

In Australia, this problem is framed by the Fair Work Act, which governs enterprise bargaining. As both the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) have pointed out, over the last decade, this industrial relations regime has seen record low-wage growth. Consequently, early in his term, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese introduced amendments to allow unions to engage in multiemployer bargaining and to make industrial action legal during such bargaining.

While multiemployer bargaining may improve the position of some workers who have previously been excluded from the enterprise bargaining system, more than two million workers in smaller workplaces are excluded. In addition, these amendments are not likely to boost wages in the short term because bargaining is a lengthy process, and it can take more than a year to finalize some agreements.

On top of that, the new Fair Work Act contains features that give employers enhanced abilities to stymie negotiations and limit workers’ right to take action. These will make it even harder for unions to overcome the impact of decades of declining membership and low levels of shop floor organization in most sectors.

At any rate, this is beside the point for many workers who are already covered by enterprise agreements that have yet to expire. Before they are up for renegotiation, these agreements will deliver a decline in real wages.

Rebuilding Living Standards

Consequently, while it’s important to push for a revitalization of unions — as well as pro-union laws — it’s necessary to also raise demands that can immediately boost incomes for workers and poor people.

The most obvious solution is a universal income supplement. Such a supplement has a number of advantages. For one, it could be adjusted more rapidly than wages. And by making it universal, it would ensure that people who don’t earn wages — like owner-operators or social security recipients — are not left behind.

While this may seem politically impossible, recent precedents would suggest otherwise. In the fifteen years since the 2008 global financial crisis, federal governments led by both the Labor and Liberal Parties have made one-off cash payments economy-wide. Although these were aimed at boosting consumer spending in the short term, there’s no reason why they couldn’t also supplement wages on a regular basis. There’s also no reason to think such an income subsidy would detract from the push to increase welfare payments to the poverty line.

Measures that maintain purchasing power, while important, are also likely to drive up prices in some sectors of the economy because businesses will likely take advantage of an increased capacity to pay to engage in price gouging.

To ensure that we aren’t just boosting profits, we can follow the advice of Weber and her colleagues, who advocate capping price rises on key commodities, which would both restrict profiteering and help to stabilize inflation. Obvious candidates for price controls would include utilities bills — particularly power and gas — as well as fuel, transport, and food.

In addition, governments should act to freeze both rents and mortgage payments. The Greens have made a rent freeze a key demand at both the state and federal level, building pressure on the ALP. However, a freeze on mortgage repayments is just as crucial. Skyrocketing repayments can lead to mass mortgage defaults. If this happens, house prices could drop to a point where they are much lower than the mortgages that are owed. The outcome for people who default would be both homelessness and a substantial debt. At the same time, a rapid price drop triggered by a glut of mortgage defaults would encourage vulture capitalists who can shoulder borrowing costs to buy up cheap housing while the market is depressed.

Who Will Pay?

Critics will echo former UK prime minister Theresa May’s comment that “there is no magic money tree” to argue that the federal budget — still recovering from the pandemic — cannot absorb additional social spending.

This is wrong. As economists John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson put it “there is a magic money tree . . . one version of which would be tax havens, multinational enterprises, and the mega rich.”

Specifically, research by the Australian Institute indicates that over the past seven years, five of the six major gas exporters paid no tax on $138 billion in revenue. Indeed, this is part of an ongoing problem that has seen large corporations avoid tax obligations in country after country. In addition to tightening regulations, a potentially simple solution would be to introduce windfall taxes on profits that have expanded as a result of cost increases beyond real inflationary pressures.

Indeed, by limiting greedflation, windfall taxes could help bring down consumer prices, and limit the extent to which income subsidies are needed.

Beyond this, there’s an even more obvious magic money tree: the third stage of the tax cuts originally introduced by the former Scott Morrison Liberal government. These cuts primarily benefit high income earners and if Labor cancels them, the move would retain an estimated extra $238 billion in government revenue over the next ten years.

Of course, it’s increasingly apparent that like neoliberal governments elsewhere, the Albanese Labor government has no intention of prioritizing workers’ interests over corporate profits. But this isn’t the point of raising these demands. Over the last six months, the Greens have proven they can build popular support behind policies that identify real problems workers and poor people face, and pose real and immediate solutions to them.

If the union movement also campaigned around redistributive policies, it would not only increase pressure on the government — it could also help the unions rebuild their power by recruiting and mobilizing members.

The trend of political “frenemies” uniting to debate across partisan lines isn’t indicative of a triumph of humanity over politics, but rather how much the center-right and center-left agree on stoking more inequality, war, and rewards for elites.

Former US president George W. Bush receives a hug from former first lady Michelle Obama as they attend the opening ceremony for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on September 24, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Zach Gibson / AFP via Getty Images)

In the early 1970s, the BBC Radio’s Robin Day presented a series of discussions featuring leading parliamentarians of various ideological persuasions. The conservations were cordial enough, but the surviving tapes are interesting mostly because of the profound political and philosophical differences they elucidate. Whatever superficial terrain of agreement they might have found, the likes of future Labour Party leader Michael Foot and arch-reactionary Enoch Powell certainly did not spend their appearances on the program engaged in jocular backslapping.

Today, a burgeoning and popular genre of political frenemy content replicates the format of such discussions while straining it of all ideological weight and gravity. In 2017, after left-wing MP Laura Pidcock was raked over the coals for saying she would never share a beer with a Conservative, the Guardian ran a fluffy feature in celebration of friendship across Westminster’s partisan divide. Pidcock, it declared, was actually “an exception rather than the rule . . . in a place where even fierce ideological opponents rarely hate each other half as much as outsiders think.”

Whenever it’s invoked, this framing is intended as a warm and fuzzy one. Beneath the poisonous rancor and division that so often characterizes politics today, the story goes, many elected officials actually spend their time cooperating and are just as able to share a friendly libation as they are to trade barbs in the halls of power.

Paying customers, for example, can now experience a “MasterClass” courtesy of “unlikely friends” Karl Rove and David Axelrod, who respectively helped make George W. Bush and Barack Obama president. Former Tory cabinet minister Rory Stewart and former Tony Blair consigliere Alastair Campbell host the podcast The Rest Is Politics, where the two trade war stories (literally and figuratively — Campbell helped sell the illegal invasion of Iraq while Stewart served as a kind of neocolonial governor in its aftermath).

Most recently, former Conservative chancellor George Osborne and former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls have announced a forthcoming economics show in the same vein. “Ed and I are frenemies — once bitter foes, and now firm friends,” Osborne told the Guardian. “When we talk politics and economics, I find myself talking to someone who brings a different perspective but with an insight and intelligence I rate.”

The political frenemies genre is invariably celebrated as a triumph of basic humanity over acidic brinkmanship. But any real interrogation of its premise elicits some less rosy conclusions. If two erstwhile political opponents are able to form such a close friendship, after all, one possible explanation is that their disagreements were never all that profound to begin with.

As chancellor, Osborne presided over a destructive austerity program predicated on a bogus understanding of the relationship between economic growth and public spending. While seated across from him, in what was nominally an adversarial role, Balls openly embraced the core logic of austerity, promised to make similar cuts, and was instrumental in steering Labour’s leadership away from the initial promise of a more progressive fiscal policy.

Even granting that the two may disagree on certain things, it’s difficult to assign those disagreements any real weight when you stop and consider what was actually at stake. According to one notable study published by the University of Glasgow, Osborne’s austerity program ultimately caused nearly three hundred thousand deaths, its most likely victims being the disabled — who were nineteen times more likely to be affected by the combined cuts to welfare, housing, and social care benefits.

This, rather than any enlightened exchange of ideas or celebration of post-partisanship, gets at the real essence of the frenemies microgenre, which is ultimately no more or less than a kind of vapid centrist infotainment masquerading as a balm for social division.

Over the past several decades, the ideological space separating the center-right and center-left throughout both Europe and America has narrowed so much that there is often little difference beyond the margins among the elites who dress for each team — and greater solidarity between them than for those outside of the political class for whom the consequences of public policy are considerably less abstract.

Far from demonstrating the warm possibilities of convivial discourse across the partisan divide, the political frenemies genre is actually symptomatic of a political culture in an advanced stage of moral and ethical rot: one in which disagreement is reducible to a low-stakes parlor game and empty performances of intra-elite affinity are more highly prized by those with power than the constituents they represent.

Early on Sunday morning, tragedy struck at Rocky Mountain National Park as a 26-year-old woman tragically died after falling 500 feet while free solo climbing. She had been climbing with a 27-year-old man, both from Boulder, Colorado, when he contacted the park rangers via cell phone to report her fall.

At the request of the National Park Service, the Colorado Air National Guard helicopter at Buckley Air Force Base was called upon to airlift the uninjured man away from the area via a hoist operation. The Rocky Mountain Rescue Group also assisted with the rescue mission, employing a winch-operated cable. Flight for Life Air Ambulance then aided in aerial reconnaissance.

On Monday morning, a Rocky Mountain National Park search and rescue team hiked to the area above Ypsilon Lake to prepare for a helicopter long-line recovery. Northern Colorado Interagency Helitak transported the woman’s body to the Larimer County Coroner and Medical Examiner’s Office. Once there, the coroner will determine the cause of death. The woman’s identity will be released after her next of kin has been properly notified.

This woman’s death is an incredibly sad testament to the inherent danger of free solo climbing. Although the activity is both thrilling and rewarding, taking all necessary precautions before attempting it is essential. The National Park Service underscores the importance of always using appropriate safety equipment and being conscious of one’s surroundings.

Ultimately, this tragedy serves as a heartbreaking reminder of the fragility of life and underscores the importance of exercising caution when engaging in potentially dangerous activities. During this difficult time, our thoughts and prayers are with the woman’s family and friends.

There are very good reasons the US government should forgive student loan debt — not just for the debtors themselves, but for working-class people without college degrees too.

Student loan borrowers and advocates gather for the People’s Rally To Cancel Student Debt During The Supreme Court Hearings On Student Debt Relief on February 28, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Jemal Countess / Getty Images for People’s Rally to Cancel Student Debt)

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Biden student debt cancellation plan came at a bad time for American households and the US economy more broadly.

President Joe Biden’s inability to pass a student debt cancellation plan through Congress was yet another instance of fledgling progressive economic policy being torpedoed by gridlock and corporate subservience. Turning instead to an injunction from the Department of Education, Biden’s plan would have slashed $430 billion in federal student loans for roughly forty-three million borrowers. This amounted to $10,000 a student (and $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants), which would have helped shrink the average federal student loan debt balance of $37,717.

The Supreme Court majority opinion argued that the “statutory permission to modify” (elucidated in the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act or HEROES legislation) does not authorize “basic and fundamental changes in the scheme,” which they argued debt cancellation would constitute. As a result, millions of students will now need to begin servicing their federal loan repayments, which were paused on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The resurgence of these payments comes at a time when signals of economic hazard and struggle are mounting. The US economy is not technically in a recession. But many mainstream indicators for labor market robustness mask hidden frailties in the economy, in large part due to the distorting impact of high inequality. In other words, people are living the reality of a recession, even if the official numbers don’t necessarily show it. As a result, 32 percent of American adults are falling behind on debt payments, while 25 percent of US parents have struggled to pay for food or housing in the last year.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, harrowing stories are emerging about already-struggling people who have little avenue to pay for an incoming regime of debt repayments. This includes people like Joanna Kearns, forty-two, who told the Financial Times that she is a full-time caregiver for a parent receiving cancer treatment and is trapped by $60,000 of student debt that she owes. Like other graduates, her debt was taken out while she was a teenager.

The opposition to student debt forgiveness is easy to understand. Millions of Americans are already struggling to make ends meet, and most of them have never benefitted from the advantages of a higher education degree. Why should taxpayers front a bill to pay for higher education degrees they haven’t received or benefitted from?

Yet there are very good reasons the United States should forgive student loan debt — not just for the debtors themselves, but for everyone.

The student debt crisis is the result of bad policy, greed, competition between universities, and technological change. Understanding its catalysts is important because of the “moral” character the debate often takes. “If history shows anything,” observed anthropologist and debt historian David Graeber wrote, “it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

Many Democratic and Republican members of Congress have shown indifference or callousness to the student debtors on precisely this basis. Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina and chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, remarked that “there’s no such thing as forgiveness” and that Biden’s plan transferred “debt from borrowers who willingly took out student loans to hard-working taxpayers who did not.” Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, similarly commented that the plan “forces hard-working taxpayers who already paid off their loans or did not go to college to shoulder the cost.”

These moralized arguments depend on two assumptions. The first is that graduates can reasonably pay back the debt. The second is that graduates in debt could have chosen to not go into debt. Yet neither assumption is necessarily true. To reaffirm the case for student loan forgiveness, it is worth taking each claim one by one, before also discussing the broader macroeconomic implications of the student debt crisis.

Prospects for Debt Repayment

On the first of these points, there is no question that higher education is no longer sufficient to guarantee entrance into the middle class — yet it is increasingly a requirement for it. For starters, the differential between those with a college degree and those without it has never been higher. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median annual wage for a full-time worker with a high school diploma is $30,000. For a full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree, it’s $52,000. This gap of $22,000 is the highest on record.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s data mirrors the findings of a recent paper by Lawrence Katz, Claudia Goldin, and David Autor, which similarly uncovered an increase in the college wage premium relative to high school diplomas. And much of this shift has been driven by longer-term macroeconomic movements — perhaps most notably digital technological change, which increased returns in high wage occupations through “skill-biased” dynamics.

In more recent years, however, the returns from college seem to have consolidated among a more rarefied group of institutions and disciplines. This mirrors broader labor market trends, which have seen growing wage inequality and middle-class erosion. Top universities and degrees in high-demand fields are commanding huge labor market returns, while a majority of institutions and degree-holders are left behind.

Undergraduate degrees from top ranked colleges and universities — Harvard, Stanford, MIT, for example — are vacuuming up forty-year returns around $2 million across all disciplines. For the vast majority of colleges and universities, these gains are not nearly as high. In many cases, they fail to justify their costs; for example, Emerson College’s rate of return after ten years is negative. And for students who either don’t finish their degree or attend a for-profit college, the return on their education is particularly bad.

Choosing a degree related to a growing field can bolster a student’s post-graduate chances of success. Yet shifts in labor market demand can be hard to anticipate, and teenagers often lack access to the information that would help them make the most informed decision. It is a cruel irony that in a country where it is generally illegal for an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old to drink a beer, they are nonetheless expected to make a complex decision about educational returns, debt, and degree choice, with lifelong implications. Meanwhile, tuition prices have increased by over 500 percent since the 1980s, significantly outpacing income growth.

For a majority of students, this increase in tuition has also outpaced growth in their returns on college degrees. And this manifests in a rising inability to pay off loans among each successive class of students. The result is that too many students are currently paying too much for programs that offer them far too little.

The Student Loan Choice

If millions of students cannot afford to pay off their student debt, shouldn’t they have chosen not to go into that debt in the first place?

This objection to student loan forgiveness is shortsighted. The total tuition burden is far greater than available scholarship and grant funding. So as a simple question of resources, it is impossible for most students to avoid taking on debt when they attend college. The most secure methods of avoiding debt involve two factors generally out of student control: their family’s wealth and the possibility of accessing cheaper in-state tuition.

Students frequently face a conundrum of two risky options. They can take on debt for a college degree, which may not offer them a significant enough financial return to pay off their loans. Or they can choose not to get a four-year higher education degree altogether, which brings with it limitations on economic mobility and access to middle- and high-wage occupations.

Given the role of technological shocks in hastening the returns on certain college degrees, all while wages for high school graduates stagnate, the decision not to go to college is likely to be increasingly limiting. This is to say nothing of the broader societal and cultural social goods that arise from having a population able to train, explore, and become better educated through a college degree.

The hike in tuition fees is particularly pronounced at top private institutions, but it is happening across all of American higher education. The continual growth of tuition — far outpacing inflation — owes itself to a destructive amalgam of competition between universities, cheap credit, and technological change. Since admissions for top programs is more competitive than ever before, and demand is less elastic, it has emboldened top colleges to increase tuition, investing in more robust infrastructure, resources, departments, and buildings. Lagging institutions, looking to compete with top colleges, have similarly increased their tuition to catch up.

But bad policy is the chief reason for growing tuition fees. In the 1970s, the United States began to substitute welfare transfers for access to cheap credit, which spurred exponential growth in the economy’s leverage, driving low- and middle-income households into debt. Given the high demand for admission to selective colleges and universities, the access to cheap credit functioned to artificially inflate students’ purchasing power, allowing them to pay higher tuition fees through debt financing. So colleges and universities continued to increase tuition, simply because they could. Furthermore, unlike most other developed countries, there are no tuition increase caps.

Other countries have approached higher education with much more effectiveness. Many European countries have made colleges tuition free. And even the United Kingdom — experiencing a regressive economic and political backslide from over a decade of Conservative Party rule — has implemented provisions to protect students from unbridled debt. This includes tuition caps, which don’t go far enough, but do offer some protection in keeping fees below $10,000 annually. The British approach to higher education also includes an explicit debt forgiveness scheme, linked to earnings. And all British citizens have their debt wiped after thirty years.

Whose Responsibility?

A common retort by some lawmakers is to point out that, although these US policy failures have been damaging, it is not the taxpayers’ responsibility to clean up the mess. Once again, this is a claim that we should dismiss for three reasons.

First, and most obviously, the argument is hypocritical. Under President Donald Trump, Congress passed a $1.9 trillion tax cut, disproportionately benefitting the wealthiest Americans and corporations. These cuts did not benefit the broader economy enough to counteract the loss of federal revenue and the growth in the national debt. On average the United States spends $826 billion on its military each year, exceeding the next ten countries’ defense budgets combined. Fifty-six percent of US adults support cutting this budget, which includes $422 billion spent each year on private defense contractors.

While figures capturing military waste are hard to solidify, the Pentagon’s own report found that it could save $125 billion a year by reducing staffing, through retirements and attrition. And by reigning in foreign tax havens for the rich and corporations, the United States could bring in well over $10 trillion in unpaid taxes over ten years. To reduce the federal deficit and cut the burden for middle- and low-income taxpayers, these are better places to start than preserving student debt.

Second, the securitization of student loan debt — little reported in the media — has been a source of profit for investors. Student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) have been around since 1992, totaling an issuance of $600 billion of securities, with $170 billion worth still outstanding. Most of the securitized debt is made up of private loans. It is an effective example of how the financialization of student debt — through credit extension — created a higher education market built upon the exploitation of middle- and lower-income students.

Third, and of most concern for everyone regardless of circumstance, the student debt crisis is an economic albatross that limits economic growth in the short run while putting it at risk in the longer run. Mainstream economic research suggests that the student debt burden likely plays a role in widening economic inequality, stunting economic growth, making recessions deeper and longer lasting, and generally increasing America’s vulnerability to unexpected economic shocks. And when such shocks do occur, the glut of private debt often gets transferred into public debt in the form of a bailout, which is fronted by taxpayers.

In this regard, debt forgiveness is nothing new. America wiped clean the debt and faulty balance sheets of major banks and financial institutions in 2008, staving off an even deeper crash. In response to the COVID pandemic, the United States offered a pause on debt repayments in addition to direct welfare transfers. These didn’t go far enough in the form of a bailout for students, but they showed an understanding that eliminating student debt helps the overall economy.

Biden’s debt forgiveness plan was far from perfect. A better approach would offer a progressive forgiveness regime, tied to student earnings in addition to family income, and do more to stunt future credit-backed tuition hikes. Nevertheless, it was a start.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision, the student debt crisis is as entrenched as it has ever been. There is little hope of Congress taking the burden off of vulnerable students, even in the form of deferred repayments, despite the signals of economic distress in the economy. And the abject failure of lawmakers serves as yet another example of American federal subservience to corporations and the financial system at large.

Make no mistake. American politicians have few scruples about wiping away debt, even in large quantities. It’s simply a matter of who owes the debt and whether they have perceived political and economic importance.

As David Graeber put it, “As it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”

Cluster bombs are banned by most of the world, US allies are opposed to their use, and Russia was widely condemned for deploying them over the last year. So why is the Biden administration sending them to Ukraine?

A member of the Ukrainian Special Forces holds a Russian missile cassette that carried cluster bombs. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Fresh off the decision to litter eastern Ukraine with toxic depleted uranium rounds, the Biden administration has just okayed another godawful idea we’re told is meant to benefit ordinary Ukrainians: the supply and use of cluster munitions in the country’s eastern regions.

There’s a reason why 123 countries — including 70 percent of Washington’s NATO allies and aspiring member state Sweden —  have signed on to a convention banning cluster munitions, and why even US laws effectively ban the US government from providing or producing them: they are dreadful, mangling things that kill and maim children and other innocents for decades and decades after the fighting has ended.

Cluster munitions are one of those inventions so diabolical, it makes you have second thoughts about whether the development of human intelligence was really a good idea: a shell that splits midair into hundreds and even thousands of smaller explosives that fan out across an area as large as several football fields to explode upon landing — and whose high dud rate ensures that if they don’t kill or disfigure anyone when they’re first fired, they’ll do so years later when someone happens to be unlucky enough to stumble across them.

They’re still killing and wounding in Laos, where millions of unexploded cluster bombs are left over from the US war in Vietnam, and where 75 percent of the victims are kids. In Kosovo, where they were also used by NATO forces, victims were nearly five times more likely to be under fourteen years old. Forty percent of cluster munition casualties were likewise children in Syria, which accounted for 80 percent of the more than four-thousand casualties from the ordnance recorded from 2010–19.

And when they’re not exploding in the faces of innocent children, they’re killing US troops themselves, both in the countries they’ve been deployed to fight in and back home, around military firing ranges.

US officials and their allies well understand cluster munitions crosses major ethical lines, since at the start of the Ukraine war they quite rightly condemned Russian forces’ appalling use of the weapon. When a reporter asked former White House press secretary Jen Psaki about it and if there’s “a red line for how much violence will be tolerated against civilians in this manner,” Psaki replied that “it would potentially be a war crime.” US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said they have “no place on the battlefield.”

In the middle of the invasion, the British government called for ending their use, pointing partly to what Russia was doing in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials, too, said that Moscow had “ignored the rules of war” and was “applying forbidden means and methods” by relying on the shells.

Yet suddenly, figures have come out of the woodwork to explain why littering Ukrainian soil with more of these widely banned, child-mutilating weapons — in a war that is supposed to be to advance the cause of human rights and international “rules” — is no big deal.

“From a practical standpoint, the president did the right thing,” retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman recently told CNN. “It’s being deployed on their territory. They’re going to be careful with them.”

White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan echoed this claim, assuring reporters that “Ukraine has provided written assurances that it is going to use these in a very careful way” to minimize risks to civilians.

But Ukrainian forces have already shown a willingness to use cluster munitions in a way that puts civilians at risk.

Human Rights Watch, which has copiously documented and condemned Russian forces’ use of cluster munitions throughout this war, has compiled numerous instances of Ukrainian forces harming civilians in the country’s eastern regions, both during this war and prior to it, when Kiev was fighting a civil war against the separatist-controlled Donbas region. So has the New York Times, when it investigated a March attack on what was then the Russian-controlled village of Husarivka and concluded Ukrainian troops almost certainly fired a cluster rocket into a rural neighborhood.

Written assurances mean little, meanwhile, when the Ukrainian leadership has already repeatedly violated its pledges to the United States. We already knew Washington was, in private, not happy about the attacks Kiev has staged within Russian borders and on territory that Moscow considers its soil, including the Kerch bridge suicide bombing and, at least according to Western intelligence, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.

But recent reporting from Newsweek’s William Arkin illustrates just how fraught the situation is, painting a Washington unable to rein in a more risk-inclined Ukrainian leadership, with one military official declaring that it was clear “Zelensky either didn’t have complete control over his own military or didn’t want to know of certain actions.”

“In my humble opinion, the CIA fails to understand the nature of the Ukrainian state and the reckless factions that exist there,” a Polish government official told Arkin.

In other words, there’s little reason to believe these weapons will be used here in a “responsible” way that doesn’t lead to civilian casualties, if that’s even possible with a weapon this indiscriminate. It seems more likely that the same thing will happen in Ukraine that’s happened everywhere else cluster munitions have been used, with civilians bearing the brunt of their carnage both during the war and for years after.

Fortunately, backlash to the idea is growing. “Squad” member representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has introduced a 2023 National Defense Authorization Act amendment that would block the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, saying that for the United States to position itself as human rights leader, “we must not participate in human rights abuses” — an amendment that’s now gotten its first Republican cosponsor.

Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), the famously lone “no” vote against the Afghanistan War who’s currently running for the Senate, likewise warned that “we would risk losing our moral leadership” if the administration went ahead with the transfers, adding that cluster munitions “should never be used.” They were two of the nineteen House progressives who put out a joint statement opposing the decision, stressing that “there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb.”

It remains to be seen whether these efforts will work. But between opposition from the congressional left, widespread criticism from human rights groups, and even US allies like the UK and Canada refusing to give public assent to the decision, the Biden administration here looks more isolated than it ever has since the start of the war, which carries the possibility of a course reversal.

Whatever happens, this situation is partly a direct consequence of the wrong-headed decision, made at the very beginning of the war and doubled down on in the months that followed, to jettison diplomacy and reject attempts to negotiate an end to the war — as all wars are ended, including those happening this very minute — and instead seek total military victory on the battlefield. In the process, the prolonged fighting has not just led to enormous if little-publicized Ukrainian casualties, but to US and other NATO allies’ weapons stocks being severely depleted. President Joe Biden specifically cited a shortage of ammunition to explain this latest decision.

There are some indications that an appetite for talks to end the war are growing on the US side. Until its end comes, it’s no favor to Ukrainians to add to the myriad woes they’re suffering from, particularly those in the country’s east where the war rages most fiercely, and particularly by imitating the deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin’s military. Pretending cluster munitions are safe is not a form of solidarity.

Randy Travis, the 64-year-old country music singer and songwriter, is mourning the tragic loss of his long-time collaborator and lighting director Thomas Roberts. Roberts, who worked for Travis for over two decades, was the victim of a fatal shooting on Monday at his home in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department reports that Thomas’s wife, Christine Ann Roberts, 72, has been charged with criminal homicide for the shooting. She is currently being held on a $100,000 bond. On Facebook, Travis paid homage to Thomas, referring to him as “one of the very best stage lighting technicians in the business” and a “gentle giant of a man that wore a constant smile on his face and carried a song in his heart.”

According to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, Mrs. Roberts informed officers she had shot her husband because he had “cheated on her” and that a pistol was recovered from the scene. WKRN reports that neighbors of the Roberts spoke kindly of the couple. Another told the station about the warm and friendly welcome Thomas gave them when they moved to the neighborhood.

Amidst his grief, Travis has vowed to continue with their US tour dates for his current More Life tour. He said he is unsure if the music will have the same sweetness. Still, he has vowed to remember the blessing of having Thomas as a part of their team and sharing miles and memories with him. He added Thomas’ light in their hearts would never be extinguished or forgotten.

Roberts had also worked with the late Olivia Newton-John and had paid tribute to her following her death in August 2022. Photos on Thomas’ Facebook also showed him posing with his wife, Christine.

The death of Thomas Roberts, an experienced professional loved by many, is a reminder of the fragility of life and the importance of cherishing the time we have with our loved ones.

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