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🔹 President Joe Biden is taking a “hard look” at student loan forgiveness. Biden on Thursday confirmed that he’s considering canceling some federal student loan debt and said he would have “an answer on that in the next couple of weeks.” Advocates have pushed for up to $50,000 canceled per borrower, but Biden said that’s not on the table. On the campaign trail, he pledged to forgive $10,000 per person.
In 2016, we investigated how just about everyone involved in the student loan industry makes money off students – the banks, private investors, even the federal government. At the time, 42 million people owed $1.3 trillion in student debt. Our analysis found that if states had continued to support public higher education at the rate they had in 1980, they would have invested at least an additional $500 billion in their university systems. 💰 Read more about who got rich off the student debt crisis.
🔹 Amazon is ahead of its own goal to use only climate-friendly power. The retail giant announced this month that its investments in renewable energy power plants put the company on a “path to power 100% of its operations with renewable energy by 2025 – five years ahead of the original target of 2030.” But there was one detail left out of its press release: Much of the company’s energy use and pollution is uncounted.
In a story noting that Amazon’s climate-harming emissions rose 20% in 2020, Seattle public radio station KUOW cited Reveal’s reporting on how Amazon drastically undercounts its carbon footprint. 📦 Read more about Amazon’s impact on the climate.
🔹 Journalists are wondering what Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter will mean for the future of media and free speech. The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz noted that it’s far from “unprecedented for a tycoon to control a de-facto town square – much of the Internet is already controlled by billionaires, faceless corporations, or entities under the influence of the Chinese security state.” Reporter Melissa Chan also wondered if Tesla’s financial interest in China could lead to him taking direction from Beijing to censor tweets about violence against Uyghurs or protests in Hong Kong.
In 2018, after a Reveal investigation found Tesla prioritized style and speed over safety in its electric car factory, Musk issued a series of tweets about the entire journalism industry and responded to our findings by calling us an extremist organization. 🚗 Take a look back at more of our Tesla investigations.
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