Inequality rears its ugly head again.

What the hell -- I'm not trying to sell books anymore. Might as well stop pretending that I don't talk about politics here. 

This week's Supreme Court decisions -- particularly the one that invalidated President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan -- are what got me going this time. I have a personal stake in this: I still owe the government for one of the PLUS loans that I took out for my daughters to go to college. I made a decision before I retired to take about $30,000 out of my savings to pay off most of them, leaving a balance of just under $10,000 -- which would have gone away, if the Supreme Court hadn't decided this week to screw over 40 million Americans.

I paid off my own graduate school loan. I've paid off three-quarters of what I owed on the PLUS loans. Now I'm retired, living on a reduced income. And still there are people out there who would call me a deadbeat because I hoped for a little relief. 

But that's just one instance of how the Supremes screwed over regular Americans this week. There was also the decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions and the one about how people can refuse service to gay couples who want to get married (even if the situation is completely hypothetical, no one has been harmed, and the business isn't even set up yet!).

There's a lot to unpack with these end-of-term rulings, and I don't have the bandwidth to give it the space it deserves. (My apartment's in an uproar due to a plumbing leak in the unit above me, and I have a crazy week ahead that has now been complicated with insurance adjusters and whatnot.) But my brain has been doing its random association thing ever since the student loan order came down Friday, and the result was a rant that I posted to Facebook yesterday:

Everybody in my age cohort, by which I mean Generation Jones (mid '50s to 1963 or so), got fucked. 

We entered the work force in the mid to late '70s, just about the time when trickle-down economics took over -- when conservatives launched their long game to make money, and keep it, by gutting the middle class. We literally never had a chance. 

But at least we still had the opportunity to get an undergrad degree before college tuition went through the roof. My kids really got hosed -- they had to take out loans to afford college and graduated into the Great Recession, when there weren't jobs easily available to them so they could pay them off.

The American Dream worked for the Boomers because they had years of earnings before this shit started. That's why they think we're whiners. They never had to live through what we're living through financially.

Am I pissed? You bet I am.

I wrote about Generation Jones last year. Basically, it recognizes that those of us born between, oh, 1955 and 1963, give or take, have very little in common with the Baby Boomers we're lumped with demographically. We grew up watching the Boomers go through the Vietnam War and their reactions -- Woodstock and the Summer of Love as well as antiwar protests -- and internalized their values. Then the Boomers grew up and enjoyed, at least for a while, the postwar economy that supported the middle class the way it had their parents. Jonesers, meanwhile, came into the workforce right about when the gravy train ended thanks to Reaganomics. 

There are links supporting all this in the GenJones post I've already linked to. It looks like the link to the graphics from Inequality for All is dead, but here's the graphic that really got me when I watched the documentary (which I have stolen from a review of the doc at Zero Anthropology -- apologies for the quality of their screen grab): 

After 1977, Reaganomics and its trickle-down bullshit kicked in, and the hill to prosperity became harder and harder to climb -- hitting Jonesers and GenXers especially hard, because we feel cheated out of the American Dream that many of us lived as kids.

But see how the graph begins to fall off on the right side of the graphic? It assumed that the 2010 figure was the high point of inequality and that it would start coming down, but that was wishful thinking; income inequality continued to grow through the pandemic. However, awareness of inequality has also continued to grow. And while the Supreme Court's decisions this week seem to be aimed at cementing the disparities, by keeping down the people that should, y'know, be kept down (like Blacks and LGBTQ+ folks and basically everybody who ought not to have been granted access to an education that allowed them to think for themselves and question the oligarchy) -- and particularly when it's paired with last year's Roe v. Wade decision and its gleeful (on the part of evangelicals) aftermath --  it also feels to me like the final gasp of a dying worldview. 

It seems like we ought to be at a tipping point when the Supreme Court starts issuing decisions on bogus cases to enforce a draconian worldview that most Americans don't subscribe to. I hope we're at that tipping point. 

I've been disappointed on that score before. And yet, my hope for a turnaround abides.

It sucks to be living through this timeline. We may not begin making progress toward equality again for many years. But at some point, the pendulum has to swing back. It always does.

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The Biden administration is already working on a Plan B for student loan relief, although it won't be immediate or as far-reaching. And it may not help me, so I'm not going to wait for it. Guess it's a good thing that I went back to work...

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These moments of ranty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

What would Aunt Lydia do?

 

Stolen from Facebook / Artist unknown

Well! It certainly has been a week. 

On Thursday we learned from the January 6th committee that five or six sitting members of Congress had asked for presidential pardons for their roles in former President Trump's attempted coup. 

That headline was very shortly superseded by a Supreme Court ruling that makes it easier for gun owners to carry their weapons in public. Within hours, that headline was followed by the news that Congress had approved (and President Biden signed into law yesterday) a gun control bill for the first time in decades. Even though most Americans would view it as weak sauce, it's better than nothing. Among other things, the new law: requires background checks for 18- and 19-year-olds who want to purchase a gun; closes a "boyfriend loophole" that allowed some convicted domestic violence offenders to get hold of guns; stiffens penalties for people who buy guns for those who wouldn't pass a background check; and provides money to states for mental health treatment and for confiscating guns from those who've been deemed dangerous by a judge. Notably, it doesn't ban assault weapons like the AR-15. But hey, baby steps, I guess.

But even that news was overtaken on Friday by the release of the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which the justices overturned Roe v. Wade and then promptly left for the weekend. Liberals and progressives weren't surprised by the ruling -- after all, somebody at the high court leaked a draft in early May. But they were shocked -- okay, we were shocked -- by Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion, in which he said he'd like to see decisions that legalized gay marriage and access to contraceptives reconsidered, too. The majority opinion attempted to reassure everyone that the court didn't intend to go after those decisions -- but the three justices nominated by former President Trump swore during their confirmation hearings that Roe was settled law, making this most recent claim somewhat less than trustworthy. (Observers have noted that Thomas made no mention of overturning Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages. That's especially interesting, given that he's Black and married to a White woman -- with whom, by the way, the January 6th committee would like to have a chat, due to her involvement in Trump's coup attempt. But I digress.)

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd attended a lecture -- a Q&A, actually -- given by Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid's Tale. It occurred to me then that I had never read the sequel, The Testaments, so I did. I read the first book shortly after it was published in the '80s; it describes an America that has descended into a fundamentalist hellscape, with women forced to either submit to an arranged marriage or produce babies for the men running the place. The Testaments has been out since 2019, so the statute of limitations on spoilers has probably run; still, I'll try to avoid giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that the prime mover of this second novel, Aunt Lydia, remembers what America was like before Gilead, and is secretly doing everything she can to overturn the regime. 

I find today that The Testaments gives me hope. I don't believe we've hit rock bottom yet; things are going to get worse in the United States before they get better. But women are smart and resourceful. We won't tolerate attempts to make us give up the independence we've had for fifty years. To those who think Dobbs is the beginning of the end for liberal ideals, I say this: 

Just wait.

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These moments of bloggy upheaval have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! And if you value your freedom, for gods' sake, VOTE!

Happy Domestic Infant Supplier Day?

Yeah. It's about abortion. 

Today is Mother's Day in the United States. This past Monday, somebody at the Supreme Court revealed the high court's take on motherhood by leaking to Politico a draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The final opinion isn't due out until June or so. But this draft makes it clear that a majority of justices voted initially to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal across the country. 

Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the draft states that "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start." It goes on to say: "It is time... to return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives." Many pundits have interpreted that to mean that the Supremes want to kick the issue back to the states; in other words, state legislatures would be able to restrict, or end, access to abortion for their residents. And legislatures in conservative states are champing at the bit to do it.

But perhaps the most inflammatory statement in the draft -- other than that it would overturn Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe -- is a footnote that contains a quotation from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. If you've been wondering what that tweet in the screengrab above is about, here you go:

Nearly 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.

Yes, that's right: the Supreme Court appears set to champion the business of forcing women to bear babies they don't want so that others can adopt them.

Here's a link to the CDC report, which was released in 2008. The quote in the Supreme Court draft brief  can be found in the conclusion on page 16. The report is a statistical survey of adoption in America. What it doesn't do is suggest that women who can bear children ought to get cranking.

In fact, there are adoptable kids in America right now. Of the 400,000 or so kids in foster care on any given day, about a quarter of them are available for adoption. Why aren't those million women taking any of those kids? Well, as the CDC report states, women looking to adopt want a kid younger than two who is not disabled and isn't part of a sibling group. Note, please, that the average age of kids entering foster care is eight. 

Moreover, one-third of the available-to-adopt kids are of color. Now, I know there are white folks who would adopt a child of color; I know a few of them myself, and kudos to them. But the fact remains that a lot of people looking to adopt are in the market for cute white babies.

In any case, ending legal abortion isn't going to produce enough babies for every person looking to adopt to have one. The CDC says about 630,000 legal induced abortions occurred in the United States in 2019. But not all of them would have resulted in a live birth if they been carried to term. Women decide to abort for a multitude of reasons, after all.

Moreover, the Guttmacher Institute says there are fewer abortions now than there were when the decision in Roe was handed down. That's partly because fewer young women are becoming pregnant; in 2017, there were just 87 pregnancies per 1,000 American women between the ages of 15 and 44 -- the lowest level ever recorded.

Ending abortion isn't going to solve the adoption supply chain issue. Women will still end unwanted pregnancies; they did it before Roe, and they'll do it again if Roe is overturned. They just won't be able to do it as safely as they can do it now. Which ought to piss off every American woman, particularly those who claim to be pro-life.

One other thing: I saw a comment this week that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought Roe was a bad decision. I had trouble believing it, so I looked it up. What Ginsburg thought was that Roe was decided on the wrong grounds. Instead of making it a privacy issue (that is, the decision on abortion ought to be between a woman and her doctor), Ginsburg thought it should have been based on the idea that women have the same rights as men.

I understand why she thought so. But here are two things to ponder: 1) the Supreme Court at the time Roe was decided was comprised of nine men (eight of them white) and zero women -- the likelihood that they'd accept an equal rights argument was probably vanishingly small; and 2) the right to privacy established by Roe was used later in a whole host of cases -- everything from the availability of contraception to interracial marriage to gay marriage. Would those decisions have broken the same way without Roe as precedent? It's hard to say. But with Roe gone, it's not outside the realm of possibility that these other rights could be in danger, too.

Anyway, getting back to the draft opinion in Dobbs: The leaker may have done us a favor. Assuming the vote doesn't change between now and when the final opinion is handed down, we have more time to remind everyone about the rights we're losing. The best way to fix this is for Congress to legalize abortion across the country -- and the only chance we have of that, given the current mess in Congress, will be to increase the percentage of Democrats in both the House and Senate. Keep that in mind when you get ready to vote this November.

Oh, right -- and happy Mother's Day.

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These moments of righteous blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! And remember to vote!