Last week, to no one’s surprise, the reactionaries on the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Joe Biden’s $400 billion program to reduce student loan debt anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 per student. Equally unsurprising was Bernie Sanders’ response to their ruling:

If Republicans could provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent and profitable corporations, if they could cancel hundreds of billions in loans for wealthy business owners during the pandemic when Trump was President and if they could vote to spend $886 billion on the Pentagon, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to cancel student debt for working families.

Bernie knows the deck is stacked against working families and that the High Court’s current makeup reflects this reality. That the case against student loan relief had “standing” only because the court accepted the brazenly false claim that forgiving such loans would somehow hurt the state of Missouri.

Swamp Rabbit tossed in his two cents’ worth: “Them students got suckered into taking out high-interest loans they can’t afford to pay back. It’s their own fault, ain’t it?”

“Fault is the wrong word,” I said. “The system is rigged to pile maximum debt onto poor students even though tuition costs get crazier every year. They would have paid a lot less for college back when funding higher education was thought of as a public good.”

I asked him what sort of government conspires with usurious loan-servicing companies — collection agencies, really — to shake down its own citizens as they try to better themselves. What sort of jurists go along with this shakedown instead of endorsing education policies that would help narrow the vast gap between rich and poor in this country.

“Rhetorical questions,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t no need for me to answer.”

I reminded him that the six rightwing justices on the Supreme Court were hand-picked to fight expansion of education opportunities, environmental protection, women’s rights, labor rights and all other causes that don’t serve the interests of the rich and shameless. That sinister fanatics like Leonard Leo have slowly put together a court dominated by jurists who would feel more at home in pre-Civil War America than in our time.

“Who the eff is Leonard Leo? If he’s such a big deal, how come I ain’t never seen no stories about him in the news?”

“Because the owners of the mainstream news media are members of the top one percent,” I said. “No, the top one-tenth of the one percent.”

Swamp Rabbit laughed at me. “You sure it ain’t the top one-tenth of the one-tenth?”

“Whatever,” I said, “Let’s just say the media bosses have no desire to rock the boat by pushing stories that don’t serve the interests of their class.”