Thu: Bad News!! Things Are Looking Good for Workers.

Will the QOP Have to Pay?

A new campaign launched Thursday aims to channel widespread anger over the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling against student debt cancellation into an effort to unseat House Republicans who have opposed and attempted to sabotage debt relief every step of the way.

Launched by the nonprofit Protect Borrowers Action, the campaign will focus its attention on more than a dozen Republican-held seats in battleground districts, targeting Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), and 10 others ahead of the 2024 elections.

Each of the House Republicans that Protect Borrowers Action is looking to unseat signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down President Joe Biden's debt relief plan and supported a failed effort to repeal the president's program using the Congressional Review Act.

The SCOTUS Decision on Student Debt Reaches Far and Wide

Isabella Johnson, a psychologist in Arkansas, has a lot on her plate. She helps her son, who has some pre-existing health issues, pay his debt on both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. In August 2022, President Joe Biden announced his plan to forgive some student debt. For Johnson, that meant she could move forward with other large expenses. She just bought a house two weeks ago.

A series of rulings last week by the Supreme Court striking down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness programme has changed her situation. After the ruling, the mortgage lender backed out because now her income-to-debt ratio – which compares how much she owes each month with how much she earns – no longer works for them.

Tim O’Connell of Roanoke, Virginia, also had his eyes set on a home. July 11 will be the first anniversary of his job with the United States Postal Service. He’s a Pell Grant recipient and owes $16,000— $4,000 less than the Biden administration’s proposed cap for Pell Grant recipients.

Thanks to a little help from the promised debt relief, he was able to pay off his car and almost all of his wife’s, as well. The American dream of home ownership was within arm’s reach, said O’Connell. However, the Supreme Court’s decision has pushed that milestone further down the road.

A 2021 Brookings Institute report found that if forgiveness was on the table, consumers were more likely to buy a new home, start a new business or even start a family.

US roll back of student loan forgiveness hits borrowers, economy

Who Wants False Happiness?  30 Million People Did Yesterday.

Thirty million users have signed up for Meta's newly launched Threads app on its first day, the company's chief Mark Zuckerberg says.

He pitched the app as a "friendly" rival to Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk in October.

Experts say Threads could attract Twitter users unhappy with recent changes to the platform.

But Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said though Twitter is "often imitated", its community can "never be duplicated".

Threads allows users to post up to 500 characters, and has many features similar to Twitter.

Earlier, Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform "friendly... will ultimately be the key to its success".

But Mr Musk responded: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."

When asked on Threads whether the app will be "bigger than Twitter", Mr Zuckerberg said: "It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.

His Defense Is That He Is Too Stupid to Live

A tourist who was caught on video defacing the wall of the Colosseum in Rome last month by carving a love note into it claims in a letter of apology that he was unaware the nearly 2,000-year-old amphitheater was ancient.

The man, identified by his lawyer as 27-year-old Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, used a key to carve “Ivan+Hayley 23” onto a brick wall of the structure on June 23 in a move that drew outrage on social media and from Italian officials.

In a letter dated July 4 and shared with NBC News by his attorney, Dimitrov wrote: “I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the antiquity of the monument.”

The letter was addressed to the mayor of Rome, the City Council and city magistrates.

Bad Law

Law professors Leah Litman and Laurence H. Tribe wrote about the legal implications of the preliminary injunction issued by federal Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana in Missouri v. Biden, prohibiting most contact with social media companies by the Biden Administration.

There is considerable precedent that recognizes that the government can ask private parties to remove content. That precedent exists for a reason; if it didn’t, the government couldn’t communicate with private parties about their content moderation policies, or whether (hypothetically) foreign governments were trying to make certain content go viral in order to reduce voter turnout, inflame divisions, or make the country less safe. There are myriad legitimate and indeed compelling reasons the government might have to ask social media companies to remove content. And the First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking. To treat the First Amendment as creating something like a wall of separation between government and powerful private actors is utterly bizarre. It would turn the Constitution’s protection of free expression in an open society into an obstacle course for some of the most valuable exchanges of information and ideas we can imagine.

The district court cited all the precedent supporting this public-private dialogue before cavalierly dismissing it, in part by declaring that “what is really telling is that virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech.” As if the cases that supported the government all of a sudden didn’t matter because this case involves conservatives? (One side note: Several of the allegations in the complaint occurred during the Trump administration. Communications between social media companies and government officials happen no matter who’s in power, and the First Amendment is not supposed to lean right or left.)

There is also the fact that the district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do. Take the allegations concerning hydroxychloroquine. On pages 52-53 of the opinion, the district court recites the very serious allegation that the Department of Health and Human Services “suppressed speech on hydroxychloroquine” by having Dr. Anthony Fauci make “statements on Good Morning America and on Andrea Mitchell Reports that hydroxychloroquine is not effective.” The next sentence then reports that, after this apparently very coercive Good Morning America appearance, “social-media platforms censored” videos and material that were pro-hydroxychloroquine. That must have been quite the Good Morning America appearance. But joking aside: A government official appearing on a television show and stating that certain speech is disinformation does not come even remotely close to the government coercing social medial companies into removing that speech.

Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

Drinking water from nearly half of U.S. faucets likely contains “forever chemicals” that may cause cancer and other health problems, according to a government study released Wednesday.

The synthetic compounds known collectively as PFAS are contaminating drinking water to varying extents in large cities and small towns — and in private wells and public systems, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Bad News!!  Things Are Looking Good for Workers.

The number of available jobs in the United States dropped in May after an uptick the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday.

Job openings fell to 9.82 million at the end of May, dropping from an upwardly revised 10.3 million in April, according to the BLS’ latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report.

Economists had projected that openings fell to 9.935 million for May, according to Refinitiv.

The Federal Reserve has been hoping for more slack in the labor market, since an imbalance between worker demand and supply could cause wages to rise and, ultimately, add upward pressure to inflation. The central bank has tried to tame inflation with 10 consecutive rate hikes, followed by a pause at its June meeting.

The May JOLTS data showed that the number of new hires rose to 6.21 million from 6.1 million, quits jumped up to 4.02 million from 3.77 million and layoffs dipped to 1.56 million from 1.59 million.

As of May, there were 1.6 open jobs for every person looking for one, BLS data shows.

It's a Good Time to Be a Bank

When central banks raise interest rates, mortgage borrowers can expect higher monthly repayments, while savers are supposed to be rewarded with bigger returns on their deposits. Or so the theory goes.

A top UK financial regulator has called a meeting with the bosses of the country’s biggest banks Thursday for them to explain why the rates on their savings accounts lag so far behind the central bank’s main interest rate — as well as the interest they charge on mortgages and other loans.

Some lawmakers and consumer rights advocates think profiteering is the reason.

It’s a similar story elsewhere in Europe and in the United States where, after more than a year of aggressive rate hikes to tame inflation, the interest that savers earn on their cash has been left in the dust.

In the US, where benchmark borrowing costs stand between 5% and 5.25%, the typical savings account pays out just 0.42% in annual interest, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Meanwhile, the cost of a typical 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has hit 6.71%.