Weekend Economists Plead the Fifth; December 14-16, 2012

[Demeter]

38. The “People’s Bailout” was Just the Beginning: What’s Next for Strike Debt?

http://www.nationofchange.org/people-s-bailout-was-just-beginning-what-s-next-strike-debt-1355501046

...Gokey helped create the Rolling Jubilee, a "People's Bailout" project which has raised over $465,000. With that money, the activist group Strike Debt plans to buy $9 million of Americans' medical and educational debt for pennies on the dollar—and then cancel it.

Strike Debt, which grew out of Occupy Wall Street, wants to foment conversation about the debt we rack up in pursuit of basic needs, and the industries that profit from that debt. Gokey is currently on a year-long unpaid leave from teaching to help organize the Rolling Jubilee and upcoming Strike Debt projects...

...Fabien: How did Strike Debt's organizers find each other and come up with the idea of Rolling Jubilee?



Thomas: This idea has been floating around activist circles for a couple of years. I first encountered it in Zuccotti Park last October, and I thought, this is a brilliant idea—somebody needs to make it happen. And everyone said, “Okay, well you make it happen.”

So I've been working on it for 14 months now, and Strike Debt itself formed after May Day. We saw in the park that debt was one of the ties that binds the 99% together. A lot of us there just had this massive amount of debt and no adequate work to pay it back...

Fabien: According to RollingJubilee.org, you've raised enough money to abolish about $8.7 million in debt. How much debt has been bought to date?

Thomas: This process takes some time. On November 12 or so, shortly before the telethon, we closed on our first debt purchase. We had raised $5,000, which we spent to purchase $100,000 worth of medical debt.

We are in the process of lining up a bigger buy as we speak, but I don't know how long it's going to take. There's a certain due-diligence process that needs to take place, and a lot of research and reviewing different portfolios. We're in the middle of that now, and we'll act on that as soon as we possibly can.

In the future, we are going to be looking beyond medical debt, toward other kinds of debt. But as a conservative estimate, we should be able to abolish 20 times the amount of money we raised, even factoring in all of the associated costs of the process, like accounting and mailing letters to debtors informing them their debt has been abolished,.

We won't know for sure how much debt we can abolish until we actually abolish it, but 5 cents on the dollar is conservative. You can find out-of-statute debt that is being sold for one tenth of one penny on the dollar. This is debt that, technically, people no longer legally owe, but debt collectors buy it anyway because it's legal for them to trick former debtors into paying it....

USEFUL LINKS:

http://strikedebt.org/ http://strikedebt.org/#initiatives

http://strikedebt.org/Strike-Debt-Organizing-Kit.pdf

http://strikedebt.org/The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manual.pdf