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!

Pity the poor billionaires.

SIphotography | DepositPhotos

Oh, woe is our poor billionaire class. Someone has suggested that they've amassed too much wealth and wants to take it from them -- and that someone has a shot at winning the presidency next year. Why, she has even come up with a plan to tax a portion of their wealth -- not their income, their wealth -- so the government can spend it however it sees fit.

The candidate is Elizabeth Warren, and since she announced her wealth tax plan, the country's billionaires, and those who serve them, have cranked up their P.R. efforts to discount her proposal. Now as you all know, this is not a political blog. So I'm not going to talk about the plan itself. Instead, I'd like to talk about the billionaires -- and this one billionaire in particular: Leon Cooperman, chairman of Omega Advisors, a hedge fund based in New York.

As you might imagine, Cooperman doesn't much like Warren's plan. He was quoted in Politico as saying her attacks on the wealthy are unfair. "What is wrong with billionaires?" he asked. And then he said, "I believe in a progressive income tax and the rich paying more. But this is the fucking American dream she is shitting on."

Warren fired back in a tweet: "Leon, you were able to succeed because of the opportunities this country gave you. Now why don’t you pitch in a bit more so everyone else has a chance at the American dream, too?"

In response, Cooperman sent her a five-page letter to say she had him all wrong. Billionaires have done great things for this country. Moreover, he's a signatory to a billionaires' Giving Pledge that promises they will give away half of their fortunes, and in fact he pledged to give away all of his.

In the wake of this letter, Cooperman was interviewed on a CNBC program this past Monday. And on the show, he teared up while talking about Warren's plan.

I'll be honest: I've read about Warren's plan, and I think I may have read the Politico story when it was published, but I didn't know about this spat between Warren and Cooperman until I saw the story about his CNBC appearance. And I didn't watch the interview until tonight.

Besides the part where he tears up, there's another section that I thought was key. You can watch it yourself at the link I posted above. Scroll down the page to the second video -- the 12-minute-long one. The quote that struck me starts at the 6:44 mark: "She's screwing with the wrong guy. I want to give it all away. Not 50-60% -- I want to give it all away. But I want to control the decision. I don't need the government giving away my money."

(By the bye, he's actually not giving it all away. He's giving away half in his lifetime, and putting the other half in a trust for his family to give away as they see fit after his death.)

Warren responded to all this in another tweet, pointing out that Cooperman is on the board of Navient, a student loan company that, she says, "has cheated borrowers and used abusive, misleading tactics. He even went so far as to ask how I might impact his investment in the last earnings call with Navient." And while he's worried about protecting his billions, young people can't pursue their dreams due to crushing student loan debt. The American dream worked great for him, Warren says, but on the backs of American students who now can't get ahead.

There are a lot of things we could do in this country if billionaires weren't sucking up nearly all of the country's wealth. CEOs at firms in the S&P 500 Index earned 361 times more than their average workers in 2017; back in the '50s, the ratio was 20-to-1. Taxes were a lot higher on the rich back then, too. PolitiFact says in 1952 and 1953, the top marginal tax rate was over 90%.

Back then, it didn't pay to be too rich; instead, company owners invested in their employees by paying them more. Now the rich want to pick who gets their money, instead of paying their employees more -- and instead of doing something to help the whole country. I'm just guessing here, but I'm pretty sure Cooperman isn't going to donate his fortune to people struggling to pay off their student loans.

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These moments of non-political blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.