(C) Common Dreams
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The Right’s War on Student Debtors May Cost Us All [1]
['Ryann Liebenthal', 'Matt Ford', 'Brynn Tannehill', 'Maria Laurino', 'Claire Potter', 'Zachary Siegel', 'Scott W. Stern', 'Illustration Pete Ryan']
Date: 2023-05-09
It is not exactly clear how Brown and Taylor found their way to the JCNF, nor what motivated them to participate in such a consequential lawsuit. In September, the Job Creators Network posted a form on its website seeking those who found debt forgiveness “unfair,” presumably to recruit them as plaintiffs for its challenge to the program. But the form may not have been a very useful tool. Shortly after it went up, a computer science student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Sean Wiggs, decided to make it his next project. Wiggs had made something of a name for himself on TikTok for sabotaging the website forms of various conservative campaigns, starting with an anti-abortion group in Texas in 2021. Not long after that, he began working as a digital strategist for the progressive activist group Gen-Z for Change. After the JCNF posted its form, another progressive group, Rise, came to him to request his particular brand of sabotage. He quickly created a bot to submit false information to the form. After two days, the JCNF took down the form, which had already solicited 120,000 fake respondents.
Ostensibly the JCNF is against debt cancellation because it is “unfair” to taxpayers, even though the group’s backers have been revealed to benefit from offshore tax shelters that hurt everyday citizens. Moreover, the JCNF itself was the beneficiary of a canceled PPP loan in the amount of $135,000. In court, the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued a different fairness point: that the existence of cancellation is unfair to those who don’t receive it. Justice Jackson was having none of it. “As a result of Covid, we had massive infusions of money given to various companies, organizations, clearly authorized because Congress said do it,” she countered. “To the extent that the government is providing much-needed assistance to people in an emergency, it’s going to be unfair to those who don’t get the same benefit.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the point more succinctly, in a formulation familiar to anyone who has ever been a child: “There’s inherent unfairness in society.”
In the wake of oral arguments, the JCNF’s president, Elaine Parker, pivoted, issuing a statement claiming that the JCNF’s real aim was to “hold colleges accountable for their price gouging of American students”—a goal rather at odds with Brown and Taylor’s supposed desire for Biden to expand the forgiveness program. More plausibly, the JCNF opposes student loan cancellation because it threatens the workforce upon which companies like Home Depot rely. The premise of Biden’s plan is that it will help Black and low-earning Americans who are most harmed by student debt, and scholarly research backs this up. Pell Grant recipients are more likely to fall behind on their loans, and Black borrowers are twice as likely as white borrowers to have received Pell Grants and have more debt and lower incomes on average. But the elimination of crippling monthly debt payments may also give its most vulnerable beneficiaries the breathing room to be more choosy about their employment and less eager to accept work in exploitative low-wage environments.
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/171713/rights-war-student-debtors-may-cost-us
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