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The Hill
03-07-2025
- Business
- The Hill
GOP's proposed cap on grad student loans sparks fears of pricing out fields of study
Congress is on the verge of greenlighting new restrictions capping how much graduate students will be able to borrow from the federal government in a move that some worry will ice marginalized communities out of advanced degrees. As part of the megabill Republicans hope to pass this week to advance President Trump's agenda, senators included a ceiling on federal student loans for graduate, medical and law students as a way to combat the rising cost of college, arguing unlimited loans incentivizes colleges to raise their prices. Graduate students will only be able to borrow $20,500 a year, with a lifetime cap of $100,000. For professional students, including those studying law and medicine, they could borrow $50,000 a year with a lifetime cap of $200,000. But with some students unable to cover the full cost of an advanced degree without a government loan, advocates worry about students turning to private lenders or skipping out on an advanced degree altogether at a time when more jobs are requiring the additional education. 'There are two very likely outcomes of this. One is that more and more students will decide graduate school is not worth it and won't go at all despite the growing share of the workforce that requires some form of post-graduate education … Those will disproportionately be Black and Latino Americans. I would expect significant growth in the private lending market, those loans will most likely have higher interest rates and fewer borrower protections,' said Kyle Southern, associate vice president of higher education quality at The Institute for College Access & Success. The GOP-crafted provision would also eliminate the Graduate PLUS program, which allows students to cover the full cost of a post-graduate program. The pitch comes as Republicans have attached a slew of measures aimed at generating savings for the federal government in the nearly 900-page package they hope to pass this week. The reconciliation bill, which has already passed the Senate, is estimated to put trillions of dollars toward the nation's deficits over the next decade. Other changes to student loans programs in the bill including simplifying repayment plans down to two options and expanding Pell Grants to include workplace programs. Asked about the proposed grad student cap earlier this week, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), head of the Senate committee that crafted the proposal, told The Hill that 'if you allow more money to be borrowed, schools just raise their tuition more, and that's what we're trying to stop.' 'There's some suggestion that there's no recourse for people who cannot borrow as much as the school would have them borrow,' said Cassidy, who also worked as a gastroenterologist for years before serving in Congress. But with changes to Medicaid, a doctors' shortage and a lack of inflation-adjusted measures for the cap, others speculate this move will lead not only to fewer medical professionals but to harm for disadvantaged communities. 'Physician groups have warned that these changes could worsen doctor shortages, in combination with the proposed changes to Medicaid that could force rural hospitals to close. This legislation can have significant impact on access to health care, particularly for rural Americans. And furthermore, because these limits are not indexed to inflation, over time, they will gradually cover less and less of the total cost of attendance,' said Sara Partridge, associate director for higher education policy at the Center for American Progress. The price of college has risen sharply since the 1980s, with a report from Georgetown University estimating a 169 percent increase from 1980 to 2019. 'The biggest concern that I'm hearing is the graduate student loan cap,' Sen. Shelley Moore Capito ( who heads the subcommittee that oversees annual Education Department funding, told The Hill over the weekend. She said she's heard from 'graduate, particularly medical schools, dental school, concerned about that.' However, Capito, who ultimately voted for the bill, also noted cases where 'these professionals are coming out with such enormous debt that I think the schools need to work to try to rein in the cost there so it is more affordable.' Cassidy argued it is 'going to be a different mix' of how the plan would work for students. 'My family helped pay for my education,' he said. 'Some people worked while they went to school. Some people borrowed money independently of the federal program. Some people got scholarships.' 'Some people, and by the way, this is very doable, committed four years to working for either the Public Health Service or the military, and they got a total free ride. Now a total free ride, and those programs still exist,' he added. Democrats have sharply criticized the plan. 'On so many levels, it's problematic,' Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.), who serves on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, told The Hill on Wednesday. 'But if you're trying to have a professional pipeline, the people who are dentists and doctors, which we absolutely need, I mean, I'm an educator, and I think that you meet people where they are,' Hayes said. 'We absolutely need job training programs. We actually absolutely need skills training programs, but we also need people with professional degrees.' 'What this says, once again, is that only the people who can already afford it should be able to go to college,' she said. 'So what about low income communities with high achieving students who want to become get a professional degree and go back to their community, to be a dentist or a doctor or, you know, a social worker, the things that require graduate degrees and saying that, unless you can, can pay for it yourself.' Other critics say further options are available to Congress to rein in the cost of higher education. If an individual cannot cover the cost of their program with the cap on federal loans, experts posit they will go for private loans, which come with their own difficulties. Some would have difficulties getting a co-signer for a private student loan, and interest rates are higher. Additionally, despite being a much smaller portion of all student loans, 40 percent of student loan-related complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are regarding private loans. 'There's certainly a legitimate conversation to be had about the affordability, especially of graduate education, and of the payoff on that return on investment. I do think that the disproportionate concern for high-cost, low-quality programs has been in the for profit college sector, and we've seen legal action taken as such. And so, if it was me making these decisions, I would take a more targeted approach to really addressing those kinds of deceptive practices and high cost, low outcome programs for students,' said Southern.
Middle East Eye
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
ICE raids: Trump's power grab is driving America towards conflict and tyranny
The abductions began in the garment sector of Los Angeles outside a Home Depot store. The targets of the raids by US President Donald Trump's masked immigration agents were the working-class Latino Americans who do the low-paid service and farm jobs in America. Among those seized were a woman who was nine months pregnant. Churchgoers. Tourists. Parents dropping kids at school. Farmworkers chased through the fields. The only common factor among those seized off the streets by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents is where they work and live: Latinos are being targeted everywhere, regardless of immigration status, gender, age or nationality. This is terror by racial profiling. The brutal tactics of ICE have shown America what dictatorship looks like: masked figures in black fatigues seizing a mother outside the school gates as she weeps and begs to be reunited with her children. To pour fuel on the flame, Trump sent 4000 members of the National Guard and 600 Marines to California, against the wishes of the governor and Los Angeles city government. This has not happened since Lyndon Johnson did the same during the civil rights movement, against recalcitrant white segregationists in Alabama. In the intervening decades, US troops have occupied countries from Vietnam, to Panama, to Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, they are occupying America. To quote Malcolm X: 'The chickens are coming home to roost.' Governor Gavin Newsom said Trump was threatening democracy with the troop deployment. Trump confirmed this by saying that Newsom should be arrested. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Yet from Los Angeles to Texas, Tuscon to New York, people are resisting Trump's mass detentions. The response to the raids was almost immediate, as communities organised to repel ICE agents. Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and water cannons have been unleashed on protesters, wounding at least two reporters covering the unrest. If the goal of this crackdown was to instil fear among migrant communities, it has worked. The Los Angeles Times reported how whole areas in the city had become 'eerily quiet' as people went to ground, fearing that any public gathering could be targeted by ICE. In South Los Angeles, street vendors disappeared and regular children's music events were cancelled. US troops have occupied countries from Vietnam, to Panama, to Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, they are occupying America On Thursday, the thuggish Trump response to opposition reached the halls of power during an extraordinary incident in Los Angeles. California Senator Alex Padilla entered a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to challenge the administration's troop deployment, but was forcibly removed by security, pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Afterwards, Padilla warned in a statement: 'If that's what they do to a United States Senator with a question, imagine what they can do to any American that dares to speak up.' By the weekend, the popular revulsion toward the Trump power grab had snowballed into huge demonstrations in cities across America under the 'No Kings' banner. On the day of a limp Trump military parade in Washington, DC, millions took to the streets to reject growing authoritarianism and brutal ICE raids. Not just in the places you would expect, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but also deep red states like Idaho and Florida. Unifying Trump's base For the Trump base, the ICE raids and deployment of troops are what was promised - the forces of the state seizing thousands of undocumented migrants, and confronting the forces of the left, 'antifa', and 'woke' pro-Palestine protesters. A CBS/YouGov survey last week found 54 percent of Americans approved of his policy to deport immigrants who are in the US illegally. But that is not proof of mass support for Gestapo-style raids. For Maga, the anti-ICE protests are organised by nefarious globalist and deep state forces, rather than being an understandable response to outrageous abuses of power. The raids are orchestrated by Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, the sinister architect of Trump's migrant crackdown. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, watches US President Donald Trump speak to journalists on 15 June 2025 (AFP) For Miller, the enemy within is anyone who is not 100 percent American, according to his white nationalist and Zionist worldview. But in an immigrant society like the US, this means going to war with a substantial part of the population. In Los Angeles, where the anti-ICE protests began, the majority identify as racial other or Hispanic. The challenge for an authoritarian movement like Trump's - in such a diverse, heavily armed nation, with a revered constitution - is to break the existing political order and impose a new one in its image. In Trump's first presidency, street protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer sparked the most prolonged period of unrest in modern US history, lasting from late May through September 2020. Millions took to the streets, thousands were arrested, dozens killed. Alongside the Covid pandemic, this unrest marked the end of Trump's hopes for a second term in 2021. For the Trump base, this was part of the conspiracy to bring down their leader. Wave of terror Trump's rise is the logical result of the failure of the established neoliberal order to revive social mobility and deal with the immiseration of half the population. (As a recent survey showed, the lower-income 50 percent of the US population has half the monetary assets of China's equivalent working class.) Trump does not have a solution to any of America's deep-seated problems: his 2025 budget plans to slash departments like housing and Medicaid, and to increase spending on defence and homeland security into the stratosphere. And so, he is unleashing a wave of terror against migrant populations as a way to shore up his base, and use the crisis to deploy emergency powers. Trump is unleashing a wave of terror against migrant populations as a way to shore up his base, and use the crisis to deploy emergency powers Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2022) wrote two years before the 2024 election that America was entering its disintegrative phase, based on the vast data sets he and his colleagues used to research patterns of societal collapse over time. And as it turns out, this prediction is unfolding quicker than could have been anticipated. Turchin sees Trump and his Maga cohorts as revolutionaries in the mould of Robespierre or the Bolsheviks, tearing down the established order. I would instead argue that Trump is a counter-revolutionary, and his movement wants to reverse the changes toward democratisation in America over the last century, returning it to one in which certain racial groups monopolise power and violence. As Black Lives Matter revealed, white supremacy had not gone way, even after the Obama presidency's cosmetic moves to mark a new, kinder America. But Turchin is correct that the second Trump presidency is of a far more revolutionary bent than the first. It is now commonplace to point to the similarities between what Trump is doing and the rise of Hitler or Mussolini. Yet America, with its federal constitution and separation of powers, cannot easily be turned into a dictatorship, and so chaos is required to bring about conditions for imposing emergency rule. On the day Trump returned to office, he asked officials to explore invoking the rarely used 1807 Insurrection Act in order to put US troops onto the streets across America. Trump is managing an uneasy coalition of conservative groups, from the Maga 'America First' base led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, to Christian evangelicals, to holdover neoconservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the tech overlords such as Elon Musk. Manufactured crises, like the ICE raids and National Guard deployments, enable him to rally his forces and suppress dissent. Military welfare state The recent bust-up with Musk was a clash of giant egos but also about tension between the billionaire class who want a smaller state and the pork barrel politics revealed in Trump's deficit-exploding budget. The numbers are mind-blowing. Taxes will be cut, military and border security spending hiked to more than a trillion dollars, while Medicaid is to be slashed by $698bn, kicking 12 million working-class Americans out of the healthcare system. Public housing funding is to be almost halved in the midst of a nationwide homelessness crisis. It is the billionaire pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, not Carlson, who control Trump and are pushing him toward a disastrous full-scale war on Iran Musk retreated in the wake of the collapse in his equity value following his X rant against Trump. He wants to stay number one, and that means kowtowing to the leader. Trump is demolishing what remains of the New Deal social contract, while inflating the military-security welfare state. That expensive hardware is now being deployed to aid Israel's war on Iran. The president who claimed he would end all the wars has possibly started World War Three. Dissent within the Maga base over Israel's genocide in Gaza and now the war on Iran is growing. There is a rift between them and the evangelicals and Zionists who have the ear of Trump. Carlson, probably the most influential figure among conservatives who support Trump, has made his position clear: 'The United States should not at any level participate in a war with Iran. No funding, no American weapons, no troops on the ground.' Carlson says this war will end the US empire. And he's probably right. But it is the billionaire pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, not Carlson, who own Trump and are pushing him toward a disastrous regime change war on Iran.
Los Angeles Times
06-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Once the center of a ‘ghetto,' a Santa Ana playground revamp hopes to rebuild community connections
Roberto Alcaras has a fondness for the place he's lived his entire life, but even he admits that the Bishop Manor townhome community in Santa Ana was not safe. Former Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters reportedly once called it the worst neighborhood in the city. Violence, gangs and drug dealing were commonplace. 'This was the ghetto,' said Alcaras, who turned 38 on Friday and has lived in four different residences in the 164-unit townhome community over the decades. 'This was bad.' He said the community has become racially divided over the years. Latino Americans live on the north end and Cambodian Americans on the south end of the property, a mix of renters and homeowners. The playground in the middle of Bishop Manor could have served as a unifying element. Instead, the dilapidated space served more as a litterbox for neighborhood cats. 'There were broken swings [and] hazards,' said Alcaras, who lives in the community with three of his seven children. '[There were] broken glass bottles. I don't know if I can use big words other than 'trash.'' Alcaras became the president of the Bishop Manor homeowners association a couple of years ago, but the community also needed outside help. Enter the Orange County chapter of Community Associations Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates for HOAs and other community associations. CAI broke ground on a Bishop Manor playground reconstruction project on Thursday. CAIOC President-elect Mike Perlof said that on Saturday, many of the nonprofit's members would join in a big work party at the property. It's all part of a new CAIOC program launched in January that's called CAID. 'Our sole purpose is to identify communities that need help with whatever,' said Perlof, a Santa Ana resident who serves as the committee chair. 'It can be anything. This is our first pilot project. I think this one really pulled on the heartstrings of our board and our membership, not only because of the playground.' Kidworks, a play-based learning nonprofit based in Santa Ana, was using the Bishop Manor clubhouse as a meeting place until roof damage forced them to relocate years ago. Perlof said that Scott Kutner, a CAI member and philanthropist who runs the HOA Community Reinvestment Fund of Orange County, wanted to help out. 'His organization had done a lot of legwork identifying Bishop Manor in specific, but just communities in need in general throughout Orange County,' Perlof said. 'It's like the perfect fit.' Due to insurance issues, CAID was limited in how much it could help with the clubhouse, so it focused its attention on the playground. Conor Ross is a construction manager volunteering his time to lead the entire build. He lives just a few miles away from Bishop Manor, which makes the project a bit more personal for him. 'This playground being right in the middle [of the complex], this is the chance for the cultures to mix,' he said. 'It's like oil and water, if it weren't for the kids. Having this super-cool, beautiful playground makes that possible. I can't think of a much better use of our time than helping out here.' Donations from a long list of project partners are making it possible, with BEHR Paint and Precision Painting donating a deep blue for a pair of mural walls. Ross' office manager, who operates her own Sheryl Bale Photography business, is designing murals on each wall. Gone will be graffiti and what Ross called a 'death post,' a short post that was formerly the bottom of a slide that could seriously injure or kill a child that fell on top of it. Perlof, a licensed general contractor, said he was so excited to start the process that he couldn't sleep on Wednesday night. 'They're just dealing with keeping the homes habitable,' he said of the Bishop Manor homeowners association. 'The playground and clubhouse are on the back burner, and they have been for it seems like a long time ... [The kids] all have their own agendas for the playground, which is adorable. Mostly it's been a lot of, 'Fix our soccer field, can we get grass?' Turf will be installed on roughly half of the playground, where the children indeed already play soccer, using the gates on each side as goals. Wood chips will comprise the rest of the area. Perlof said he anticipates having a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the playground later this month. He credited CAIOC executive director Denise Kennedy for supporting the project. 'This is totally out of the box for CAI,' he said. 'It's something that's new and different, and she's leading the charge.' Perlof said that CAID hopes to work on a significant project each year, uplifting other neighborhoods around the county. Meanwhile, Antis Roofing is working on repairing the Bishop Manor clubhouse roof. Alcaras said the goal is for Kidworks to return by mid-August. That, combined with the new playground, could transform Bishop Manor. Alcaras, a successful youth soccer coach in the area, will soon have a safe place for his youngest child, a 6-year-old daughter, to play. 'I'm grateful that there's people out there willing to help the community like this,' he said. 'I was joking around that it's not Bishop Manor, it's residential Bishop Manor now … I consider this residential. I consider this a place for families to live.'
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Nearly half of Americans breathing in unsafe levels of air pollutants
Almost half of Americans are breathing in dangerous levels of air pollutants, a new report shows, a rise compared with a year ago and likely to further increase in coming years thanks to the climate crisis and the Trump administration's sweeping environmental rollbacks. Just over 156 million people live in neighborhoods with unhealthy levels of soot or smog – a 16% rise compared with last year and the highest number in a decade, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) annual state of the air report. Soot and smog can cause premature death and increase the risk of an array of serious medical conditions such as asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, preterm births and impaired cognitive functioning in later life. Particle pollution also increases the risk of lung cancer. Both pollutants are made worse by heat waves and wildfires – extreme weather events getting more intense and widespread due to human-made global heating. Every year, the ALA grades exposure to unhealthy levels of ground-level smog (ozone pollution), and year-round and short-term spikes in soot (fine particle pollution/PM2.5) over a three-year period (2021 to 2023). Its latest analysis found that almost 43m people live in areas with failing grades for all three measures. A person of color is more than twice as likely as a white American to live in a neighborhood with unhealthy levels of smog and soot. But Latino Americans are the most impacted, and three times more likely to be breathing in both toxic air pollutants. PM2.5 or soot comes from wildfires, wood-burning stoves, coal-fired power plants and diesel engines among other industrial sources – and can be deadly. The new report includes data from summer 2023, when smoke from wildfires across Canada lit up the sky and engulfed midwestern and eastern states in soot. Ozone or smog is a potent respiratory irritant likened to causing sunburn of the lungs. After years of progress on cleaning up ozone, some communities are seeing the worst smog in years. The climate crisis-driven extreme heat and wildfires contributed to the increase in ozone levels for many parts of the country, most notably in central states from Minnesota to Texas. Warmer temperatures increase the risk of ozone forming and makes it harder to clean up. 'Families across the US are dealing with the health impacts of air pollution every day, and extreme heat and wildfires are making it worse. Air pollution is causing kids to have asthma attacks, making people who work outdoors sick, and leading to low birth weight in babies,' said Harold Wimmer, president and CEO of the American Lung Association. Only two cities, Bangor, Maine, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, were ranked as clean cities with no spikes in smog or soot, reflecting an overall worsening of air quality across the country, the report found. 'Efforts to slash staff, funding and programs at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are leaving families even more vulnerable to harmful air pollution,' Wimmer said. The EPA was created in 1970 by the Nixon government amid increasing protests over unchecked industrial expansion by public health and environmental advocates, as well as communities bearing the brunt of air, water and land pollution. The Trump administration has made dismantling climate and environmental regulations, policies and programs a top priority, and has already taken steps to gut the EPA by ordering mass layoffs and funding freezes. Environmental justice has come under particular attack, with Trump conflating efforts to address decades of environmental racism that led to poor air quality from heavy industry, landfills and highways being deliberately located in communities of color with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Even before Trump 2.0, almost 73 million people lived in counties where neither the ozone nor PM2 pollution levels are being monitored, according to the association, a public health data black hole likely to get worse as the funding cuts hit.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Latino Voters Want Black Folks to Join Them After Dissing, Black Folks React to Tim Walz Standing Up, Words You Can't Say in the Trump Administration, Lauren Boebert's Derogatory Statement and Other Political News From the Week
With President Donald Trump enacting mass deportations, attacking birthright citizenship and targeting other civil rights, some Latino Americans are organizing to protest these clear human rights violations. But in their call to action, many are begging the Black community to join their fight, and there's a couple issues with this. - Phenix S Halley Read More With concerns that the country is going up in flames, Americans are looking for strong leaders to stand up to President Donald Trump and call him out on his BS. Now, it seems folks have gotten their wish in the form of Minn. Gov. Tim Walz. - Phenix S Halley Read More On the campaign trail, Trump promised his supporters that he would do his best to reverse the progress made by Former President Joe Biden. He has worked hard to make good on his promise; Trump's slew of executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of federal and corporate levels is clear evidence of this. - Candace McDuffie Read More Yet another one of Trump's political nominees has been discovered to have a disturbing and problematic past. Ed Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and Trump's nominee to permanently hold the title, has allegedly made racist comments in numerous social media posts. - Candace McDuffie Read More Conservative Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert has a history of offensive behavior. Her latest remarks about Texas Rep. Al Green have been widely viewed as racist—and now a House Democrat wants Boebert censured. - Candace McDuffie Read More Donald Trump's political choices since winning the 2024 presidential election have been met with both controversy and confusion. Last November, he seemed determined to have Matt Gaetz serve as his attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department. - Candace McDuffie Read More They say stay ready so you never have to get ready. So with President Donald Trump disrupting the nation at its core, it's time to gear up and prepare for what the next four years and beyond has the potential to look like. - Phenix S Halley Read More kinjavideo-197501 The political pundit explains why 'Superman ain't coming' to save Black folks from President Trump. kinjavideo-197500 Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and more tech billionaires stood behind Trump during his swearing in. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
