Page 2 - Strike Debt News Today

How to beat the system and laugh all the way to the bank. Film review by Sarah Kent

How student debtors took a radical idea to the mainstream Illustrations by Lyndon Hayes In the summer of 2007, Thomas Gokey had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was thinking about how much his degree had cost him. His diploma was a simple piece of paper, but it came with a price tag of thousands of dollars—dollars that were themselves pieces of paper, transmitted to him in the form of student loans, which he now owed to the federal government. While chewi...

Eye of the storm: Bay Area debt organizers are preparing for life post-moratoriums FacebookTwitterEmail Debbie Notkin, founder of Strike Debt, photographed at her home on March 18, 2021.Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE How do you organize against trillions of dollars of debt and the lenders that control it? It’s a stupefying question without a definitive answer or action plan because the numbers are so daunting and every debtors situation varies so wildly. In March, SFGATE ran a feature story...

Either We Break Our Pandemic Debts or Our Pandemic Debts Break Us If millions had no hope of paying their bills before the pandemic, and millions more can’t pay now, what’s left to do but say no? Illustration by Tara Jacoby When the pandemic hit last year, 53-year-old Richard Ault was treading water. A longtime technologist in Silicon Valley, Ault had taken a break from the industry a few years back to work as a public school teacher. When he tried to return to the tech sector in 2018, he...

Until fairly recently, student debt cancellation was considered to be a fringe idea that, while popular among the Occupy Wall Street crowd and on the left, was a mainstream nonstarter. That’s begun to change. The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn have pushed the issue even further to the forefront. The CARES Act and then President Donald Trump put a pause on federal student loan payments during the pandemic that expires at the end of January. But with the coronavirus crisis w...

Us @ronandaily. where is the debt the worst? were looking at a lot of potential areas. in minnesota and pennsylvania, 70% of students have debt and delaware has the actual highest average debt per student at over $33,000. remember, throughout the week well be bringing you not just different facets of this problem but also different potential solutions to the challenges youre telling us about. so on that note, joining us today from washington is alexis goldstein. shes a former wall street worker ...

It. no questions asked. theyre calling it a rolling jubilee. since their online telethon on thursday night, they raised nearly $300,000 to buy or forgive nearly $6 million of debt. joining me are the organizer of the jubilee, and the author of "occupy america." also sarah ludwig, and doug henwood, editor and publisher of the left business review. all right. so, i would debt? why has -- have you guys come along organizing on debt as this singular issue? >> well, we are part of an offshoot of occu...

Wearing red squares, and pointing to bigger social problems, the privatization of all sorts of social services. so strike debt has come out of that. >> why do you think it has the emotional resonance it does? why was that the thing? i remember in the i am the 99%, that website, right, people were writing down their story. a lot of them were around debt, revolved around debt. why do you think debt has the emotional resonance it does? >> because debt is isolating, individualizing, and we are livin...

Rhetoric about our federal deficit. trumkas lament says something about the debt obsession, it has obscured also another much more dire debt crisis in america, one that continues to suppress economic growth and cause mass suffering for millions of american. thats the overhang of household debt. americans remain massively overleveraged with more than $11 trillion in household debt. most of which is mortgage debt. there seems s ts to be no poli will to deal with this, which is why a new plan by or...

$900 in 2003, to $1600 in 2012. so weve seen a rise in then industry of buying this debt, and weve also seen a rise in the amount that people owe. doug, youve written, i think, sort of both affectionately and critically about what strike debt is doing. one point is, you made is that debt in and of itself plays an important role. and you say, well, debt is entrapping or something. but if you take out debt and you get a good education, thats a good investment in building up your skills, then you c...