After the Supreme Court threw out his debt relief plan earlier in the day, President Joe Biden promised in a White House speech Friday afternoon to pursue a different legal strategy for canceling student debt. “I believe the court’s decision to strike down my student debt relief program was a mistake, was wrong,” he said. […]
Author: Hannah Levintova
The Supreme Court Made It Even Harder to Close the Racial Wealth Gap
Within 24 hours, two rulings from the nation’s highest court—one striking down the use of race-conscious college admissions, and the second gutting Biden’s student debt cancellation plan—rolled back years of progress towards greater economic justice and educational opportunity for students of color. In these rulings, the Supreme Court has all but ensured the deepening of racial […]
The Supreme Court Just Struck Down Biden’s Plan to Cancel Student Debt
The Supreme Court struck down on Friday the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student loans for about 40 million Americans. The plan, announced last August, would have canceled up to $10,000 in debt for low- and middle-income borrowers, and double that amount for borrowers from the poorest backgrounds. The […]
Emails Show Missouri’s Student Loan Servicer Never Wanted to Be In the Lawsuit to Kill Debt Relief
Newly obtained records from the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) show that executives and employees at the student loan servicer are surprised and dismayed at their company’s central role in the lawsuit before the Supreme Court that seeks to undo Biden’s student debt cancellation plan. MOHELA has never been a party to the lawsuit, […]
Death by Debt
It wasn’t long after Jessica Madison graduated in 2009 that she realized her student loans were a terrible mistake. She had borrowed $21,000 for a paralegal program at Everest College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the hope of building a more secure life, but instead she spent the next three years looking for a full-time […]
Dems Tell GOP to Stop Holding Americans’ Finances Hostage Over the Debt Ceiling
The fight over the nation’s debt limit has been brewing in Congress for months and is now ramping up. On Sunday, several Democratic lawmakers called on Republicans to stop using the cap as a bargaining chip for the GOP’s broader efforts to cut social safety net spending, a negotiating strategy that could threaten the US […]
Why Didn’t Regulators See Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse Coming?
Last week, Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent banks used by the venture capital and startup sectors, collapsed. SVB’s rapid crash—the largest such failure since the 2008 financial crisis—grabbed headlines and generated concern: How could a bank with nearly $210 billion in assets fall apart in just a matter of days? And, perhaps […]
Long Before Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse, Its CEO Helped Kill Tougher Oversight of Banks Like His
On Friday, regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent banks in Silicon Valley’s venture capital and startup hub. The bank’s collapse, the largest such failure since the 2008 financial crisis, has roiled the tech industry, in part because many venture capitalists and startups had millions in the bank coffers. The fate of […]
Sonia Sotomayor Just Nailed the Problem With the Student Debt Cancellation Challenge
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two separate cases that challenge President Biden’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt for approximately 40 million Americans. The two highly watched cases are both quite technical. But in the first argument of the day, Justice Sonia Sotomayor managed to cut through […]
The Abortion Pill’s Secret Money Men
In 1993, a group of activists rented a warehouse in suburban Westchester County, New York. It was smaller than they’d hoped and had limited ventilation, but the two other locations they’d tried to rent belonged to universities and required jumping through too many bureaucratic hoops—the exact sort of paper trail this group was trying to […]