“Colleges are expensive because of federal loans!”
Whenever someone talks about free college and expanding access, right-wingers clamor around some of the same old talking points, including the above. “Colleges started getting expensive at the same time that Federally backed loans started” is, in fact, a true statement. You’ve likely seen some variant of these:
But they don’t tell you that before those loans existed public colleges used to be directly funded by federal, state, and local governments. You might have been charged administrative or book fees, but they were nominal at best and dirt-cheap, even by both their standards and ours.
The California Public Universities (the model of schooling for the country and still the largest public university system) were effectively free from 1868 until 1966 when (take a guess) Ronald Raegan became governor and had the UC President fired because he and Hoover thought the colleges were pumping our evil socialists and dissidents.
Right-wing reactionary bigotry and fear-mongering didn’t just strike once, though. CUNY schools such as Baruch were free dating back to 1847 For some reason though, once they were fully integrated in 1976 and black people/Latinos suddenly there was an appetite for cutting funding
So, yes, people started utilizing federal loans to pay for college starting in the 60s and 70s because for the first time in a hundred years these public institutions actually cost money. If you look closely you can see exactly when tuitions started to rise and federal loans started to be used: the bump came after public schools stopped being free and started being expensive. And it isn’t just these two.
This blog told you in December that the 6-3 Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, and the only thing unclear about that is whether it will happen this June or in next year’s term. Now we are here to tell you that after Roe is gone, the next target increasingly appears to be Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that legalized marriage equality. Republicans have been hinting for months that they want Obergefell gone, and here are the latest bleak clues.
Most recently, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said that the high court wrongfully invented the right to same sex marriage. He made this point not once but four times during the Supreme Court confirmation process of now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—duringboth of his questioning periods, once during committee votes, and once more on the Senate floor. This man isn’t even facing a Senate primary until 2026, and he still felt the need to make his homophobic views very clear.
Then there’s Tennessee lawmakers introducing a pair of bills last week to establish a new class of marriage between only a man and a woman. The lawmakers “forgot” to add an age of consent for this type of marriage, opening the door to child marriages, which is very funny for a party obsessed with calling its opponents pedophiles. The bill’s Republican sponsor told a local news site that the bill gives “an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law.” This is an admission that they’re trying to get around binding Supreme Court precedent. (Alabama did a different trick in 2019 to appease homophobic judges who didn’t want to issue marriage licenses—the legislature simply replaced the licenses with marriage certificates that the couple fills out.)
The effort to take down Roe is also connected to dismantling gay marriage in a few ways. First, the evil genius behind the bounty-hunter portion of Texas’ six-week abortion ban, Jonathan Mitchell, espouses a fringe legal theory that the Supreme Court doesn’t erase laws it decides are unconstitutional, it just leaves them dormant. States would have to repeal their laws to really make them go away.
Building off that argument, another Texas Republican wrote to the state Attorney General in October that Texas never repealed its ban on gay marriage, and is asking the AG whether this allows private citizens not to recognize same-sex marriages. After seeing this letter from the Texas state rep., one of the lawyers who helped win the Obergefell case said he now believed that same-sex couples should indeed be worried about their marriages.
And Mitchell himself wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court that both marriage equality and sex with a same-sex partner (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) are court-invented rights that are “just as lawless as Roe” and invited the court to overturn them all. So there’s that!
As Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel explained to Jezebel, overturning Roe would weaken cases like Lawrence, Obergefell, Loving v. Virginia (which legalized interracial marriage), and even Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling that allowed married couples to use birth control. That’s because all of these cases are based on a right to privacy first found in Griswold and the precedents build on each other. Each case is like a Jenga block, and removing one could make the whole tower topple.
We don’t know exactly when or how Obergefell will be challenged, but the assault is starting, and it’s obvious. The Supreme Court has already accepted a case about anti-discrimination laws for next term which could rip a giant hole in protections for gay couples. It’s the case of a web site designer who wants to be able to post on her site that she refuses same-sex couples as clients, in defiance of a Colorado law. She claims the law violates her First Amendment right to free speech. In even accepting the case, the court has signaled that the chipping away has already begun.
The first crack in the Amazon empire is officially opened! It came on April 1, when the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won its election to represent the 8,000 warehouse workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island, New York.
It has given confidence to workers in Amazon warehouses and facilities across the country. Chris Smalls, interim Amazon Labor Union president, has stated that the ALU has already heard from 50 warehouses interested in organizing.
The dynamic force of younger, more militant workers, who reject capitalism and worn-out models, and the engagement of the rank and file, will have to play the key role in reviving class struggle in this country.
“I’m at a Jewish school and I’m about to make it everyone’s problem,” read the caption of one picture of Develin holding a gun posted to his social media account on March 11. Another photo posted on that day was captioned: “The playground is about to turn into a self defense situation,” according to the Columbus Dispatch.]
The world is silent when Jewish lives are threatened and Jewish blood is spilled. We know they think our lives are a joke and are dispensable, but this is fucking disgusting.
My younger siblings go to Jewish day schools. It’s terrifying enough knowing the danger they’re in due to being at a Jewish school, but now I have to be afraid that their security guards will turn against them???
We are trembling with fear inside our synagogues.
We are trembling with fear inside our schools.
And the world’s silence speaks volumes.
Jewish schools need security guards because white supremacists and people who hate Jews actively want to harm and kill us. This is not an “American school thing,” in fact in Europe synagogues are armed to the teeth. Jewish institutions need security because people will not stop trying to kill us. Using a potential antisemitic hate crime to dunk on Americans is hideously ugly and just shows how out of touch you are about antisemitism in your own country.
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