{"id":18459,"date":"2021-04-20T13:10:07","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T20:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=18459"},"modified":"2021-04-20T13:10:09","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T20:10:09","slug":"the-long-fight-to-cancel-student-loans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/04\/20\/the-long-fight-to-cancel-student-loans\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long Fight to Cancel Student Loans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.newrepublic.com\/c978c08ab091478a0ad4be8075b003de3316c349.jpeg?auto=compress&amp;w=1400&amp;ar=3%3A2&amp;fit=crop&amp;crop=faces&amp;q=65&amp;fm=jpg&amp;ixlib=react-9.0.2\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/161883\/biden-student-loans-debt-cancel#\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/edit?url=https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/161883\/biden-student-loans-debt-cancel\"><\/a><a href=\"mailto:?subject=&amp;body=The%20Long%20Fight%20to%20Cancel%20Student%20Loans%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnewrepublic.com%2Farticle%2F161883%2Fbiden-student-loans-debt-cancel\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/authors\/ryann-liebenthal\">Ryann Liebenthal<\/a>April 19, 2021 (NewRepublic.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How student debtors took a radical idea to the mainstream<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">ILLUSTRATIONS BY LYNDON HAYES<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe src=\"https:\/\/audm.herokuapp.com\/player-embed\/?pub=newrepublic&amp;articleID=cancellation-culture-liebenthal\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2014dollars that were themselves pieces of paper, transmitted to him in the form of student loans, which he now owed to the federal government. While chewing on this thought, he had an idea for a project that would occupy him for much of the next year. He obtained a letter of permission from the Treasury Department\u2019s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to go to a Federal Reserve bank of his choice and pick out some shredded bills from its stores of mutilated currency. One day, he walked over to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, five blocks from the Art Institute, and asked for some money.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNobody had ever seen this letter before,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey were really scratching their heads. So they made phone calls that kept going higher and higher and higher.\u201d Finally, the bank\u2019s vice president came down and took Gokey on a tour of the building. The mutilated money was kept several floors below, past a labyrinth of security checkpoints. \u201cThey\u2019re worried about counterfeiting,\u201d he said, \u201cso they just store shredded paper in prime real estate in downtown Chicago.\u201d At last, he entered a big, open room that resembled a vast warehouse. \u201cYou could look in any direction, and you couldn\u2019t see the back wall. It was just filled, floor to ceiling, with clear plastic trash bags of shredded money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gokey asked the vice president for a specific amount: the equivalent of $49,983, the sum of debt he\u2019d incurred to go to the Art Institute. The bank executive gathered up a stack of the shredded bills, put them on a scale, and measured out the requested dollars by weight.Be the most<br>informed person you know:<br>3 months for $5<a href=\"https:\/\/tnr-reg.onecount.net\/onecount\/form\/display.php?id=1b73609a-5e22-43ba-845d-da089d3e802f&amp;src_code=1005\">Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once home with his mutilated money, Gokey undertook the painstaking process of pulping the bills and reassembling them into paper sheets, which he planned to sell off to interested collectors. It was a clever plan: He would make an artwork to serve as a means of settling his debt\u2014thereby using his degree to pay off the cost of getting it. He called the work&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artprize.org\/thomas-gokey\/2011\/total-amount-of-money-rendered-in-exchange-for-a-masters-of-fine-arts-degree-to-the-school-of-the-ar\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped Into Four Sheets of Paper<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over the next few years, Gokey exhibited&nbsp;<em>Total Amount of Money<\/em>, hanging the large greenish-gray sheets\u2014sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically\u2014on the walls of galleries from the Midwest to the United Kingdom. He calculated the value of each square inch at $4.22, each square foot at $607.70. \u201cI sold some,\u201d he said, \u201cbut not a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By September 2011, Gokey had moved to New York state for a job as an adjunct instructor of art at Syracuse University. He found working for the university perplexing. He was making a pittance as an adjunct, and yet his students were all paying exorbitantly for the privilege of his instruction. \u201cI got really concerned about my students, who were in way more debt than I was.\u201d Gokey has a soft Midwestern voice, curious and engaged while somehow speckled with sadness. He is the kind of person who latches on to an idea and then goes way down the rabbit hole with it. \u201cI was very confused about where the money went,\u201d he said. \u201cLike, why? Why does it work this way? Why can\u2019t it work differently?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Forty years ago, it did\u2014a year of tuition and fees at a public four-year university was around $2,400 (in 2019 dollars). Now the cost is four times as much. (For private colleges, that number has tripled, from $10,575 in 1980\u20131981 to nearly $32,000 by 2019.) About 45 million people in the United States (roughly one in six adults) owe outstanding student loan debt, whose total recently surpassed $1.7 trillion, second only to mortgages, according to the Federal Reserve. That\u2019s about $37,500 per borrower, on average, and always climbing (more if you\u2019re Black, a woman, LGBTQ, or an alumnus of a for-profit or graduate school; less but more onerous if you took out debt but didn\u2019t graduate).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Student debt wasn\u2019t significant enough for the Federal Reserve to track it until 1999, when it hit $90 billion, about a twentieth of its current sum. As the numbers ticked up, it grew from a niche concern\u2014the kind of thing that might particularly exercise, say, a bunch of Occupy Wall Street utopians\u2014into a source of anxious national breast-beating. Formerly seen as \u201cgood debt\u201d that would more than pay itself back after the supposed $1 million lifetime wage boost of a degree, it\u2019s now understood to be the albatross weighing down an entire generation. The inflection point in this shift might be traced to sometime between the spring of 2012, when outstanding student debt hit&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.marketwatch.com\/story\/student-debt-surpassed-1-trillion-four-years-ago-today-heres-why-its-still-growing-2016-04-25\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">$1 trillion<\/a>, and the 2016 primaries, when Bernie Sanders made&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/grade-point\/wp\/2016\/03\/07\/these-academics-say-bernie-sanderss-college-plan-will-be-a-boon-for-african-american-students-will-it\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">free college<\/a>&nbsp;a part of his campaign for president. Or perhaps it was the next Democratic presidential primaries, in 2019, when Sanders proposed&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/economy\/sanders-to-propose-canceling-entire-16-trillion-in-us-student-loan-debt-escalating-democratic-policy-battle\/2019\/06\/23\/1eed053a-9561-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">canceling all student debt<\/a>, defining a leftmost flank on the issue and pushing the idea of cancellation into the mainstream.Be the most<br>informed person you know:<br>3 months for $5<a href=\"https:\/\/tnr-reg.onecount.net\/onecount\/form\/display.php?id=1b73609a-5e22-43ba-845d-da089d3e802f&amp;src_code=1005\">Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whatever the exact moment the notion took hold that student debt had gotten out of control, the pandemic\u2014and its economic fallout\u2014only accentuated the burden. At its highest point, in April 2020, unemployment reached nearly 15 percent. The college-educated fared significantly better, at 8.4 percent, but nevertheless saw their jobless rate quadruple in a matter of weeks. So many redundant white-collar workers, so many unpaid student loan bills. By late March, even Congress was moved to intervene with a temporary solution. At first that came in the 2019 CARES Act, in the form of a federal payment and interest pause that Donald Trump&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2020\/08\/10\/trump-extends-payment-pause-for-student-loan-borrowers-until-2021.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">extended<\/a>&nbsp;in August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once Joe Biden took office, the debate over student debt centered not on whether to cancel but on which way and how much. Biden had said he wanted to wipe out $10,000 \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/education\/2020\/11\/18\/student-debt-cancellation-biden\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">immediately<\/a>,\u201d though he waffled on the method of action. Senator Elizabeth Warren and incoming Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asked for&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/zackfriedman\/2021\/02\/04\/democrats-will-introduce-plan-to-cancel-50000-of-student-loans\/?sh=7d40eb87486f\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">$50,000 by executive order<\/a>&nbsp;on Biden\u2019s first day in office. \u201cYou don\u2019t need Congress,\u201d Schumer urged at an outdoor press conference in midtown Manhattan. \u201cAll you need is the flick of a pen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among the advocates for immediate executive action were those Occupiers, now calling themselves the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/debtcollective.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Debt Collective<\/a>, their 2011 demand for full debt cancellation suddenly seeming manifestly reasonable. Yet what few people realized was that it was because of those diehard activists, who\u2019d never stopped organizing around debt cancellation, that we were all talking about it in the first place. For years, they\u2019d faced almost ceaseless derision from the media and political establishment, and now that the issue was gaining traction, they were for all intents and purposes erased, their movement overshadowed by political machinations. For the Debt Collective, this was a big victory. It had taken nearly a decade, but they had finally been eclipsed by their own success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>While working at Syracuse University, Thomas Gokey heard about a protest movement in New York City that was coalescing around many of the same issues of indebtedness and value that had been on his mind for years. He felt called to be a part of it, but&nbsp;<em>Total Amount of Money<\/em>&nbsp;had just been accepted to the annual&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artprize.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ArtPrize<\/a>&nbsp;exhibit in Grand Rapids, Michigan\u2014an art fair founded by Rick DeVos, son of Betsy, who helps fund it. \u201cAnd I thought, You know, these things always fizzle. I\u2019m gonna show up, it\u2019s going to fizzle, and then I\u2019m going to miss this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But when Gokey got to Grand Rapids, Occupy Wall Street was still on his mind, and he started talking about it with the people who came to his exhibit. \u201cThose conversations, they all took the same form of like, OK, this is a clever solution to&nbsp;<em>your<\/em>&nbsp;debt. But what about&nbsp;<em>my<\/em>&nbsp;debt?\u2019 And I said: Let\u2019s talk about that. What are we going to do?\u201d During the three-week run of the exhibition, Gokey began attending meetings of the Occupy Grand Rapids encampment. When ArtPrize 2011 ended, in early October, he traveled back to New York and made his way to the main Occupy encampment, at Zuccotti Park. Almost immediately, he said, \u201ca switch flipped in my brain. It was like, wait a second, what if we&nbsp;<em>all<\/em>&nbsp;stopped paying our debt? What if we organized a debt strike? This is how we\u2019re going to gain leverage over Wall Street.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the time, no major politicians were talking about canceling student debt. The only measures to address the problem had so far been largely superficial. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had reformed the repayment system, adding a series of plans that pegged monthly payments to 10 or 15 percent of a borrower\u2019s discretionary income and forgave the remaining balances after 20 or 25 years. Obama had also brought the federal loan system entirely&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2011\/10\/26\/obama-proposes-changes-student-loan-programs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in-house<\/a>: Previously, most borrowers had taken out money from a bank, with the loans insured by the government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in 2010, even this seemed radical. Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander called the move to direct loans a \u201cfederal takeover\u201d such as would be expected in the Soviet Union. Nor were the most left-leaning voices in Congress then particularly concerned with student debt. The best any of them could come up with was to propose lowering interest rates or refinancing\u2014pretty standard neoliberal fare. Bernie Sanders\u2019s initial&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/college\/2015\/05\/19\/bernie-sanders-issues-bill-to-make-4-year-colleges-tuition-free\/37403269\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">College for All Act<\/a>, which wasn\u2019t introduced until 2015, made no mention of cancellation. And anyway, it failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But on the ground at Zuccotti Park, debt was among the most popular and incendiary topics. \u201cWhen the occupation of Zuccotti began\u2014and we had no idea who, if anyone, was actually going to show up,\u201d wrote the debt scholar and anthropologist&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2020\/sep\/03\/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">David Graeber<\/a>&nbsp;in 2014, \u201cwe discovered that the largest contingent by far were debt refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gokey didn\u2019t discover the student debt working group until after the park was cleared, when he was among hundreds&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2011\/11\/17\/us\/new-york-occupy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">arrested<\/a>&nbsp;during an Occupy-organized protest. After his release, he was briefly stranded in New York, sleeping in churches while waiting to get back his wallet and cell phone, among other items, from the police. He heard about an event the following week, a launch for the Occupy Student Debt Campaign\u2019s student debtor&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2011\/11\/21\/occupy-movement-proposes-refusing-pay-back-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pledge of Refusal<\/a>, in which signatories would commit to stop paying their debts if a million others also did so. Finding himself still in the city, Gokey decided to attend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in Syracuse, Gokey had already become active on InterOccupy, the internal network of the OWS organizers. Also loitering was David Graeber, who would sometimes email the other Occupiers with strange, esoteric ideas. Some of them went over Gokey\u2019s head, like the suggestion of buying up personal debts that were sold on the secondary market. \u201cWhen I read the email at first, I didn\u2019t understand any of it,\u201d Gokey said. \u201cA couple weeks later, I went back and reread that and was really scratching my head.\u2026 I didn\u2019t believe it; it seemed too good to be true\u2014that we could buy and abolish someone\u2019s debt for pennies on the dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI didn\u2019t believe it; it seemed too good to be true\u2014that we could buy and abolish someone\u2019s debt for pennies on the dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Intrigued, Gokey started lurking on debt buyers\u2019 internet forums.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/ask\/answers\/102814\/if-collection-agency-buys-my-debt-another-agency-does-debt-become-new.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delinquent debts<\/a>&nbsp;are often sold by their initial lender and wind up on what\u2019s known as the secondary market, bundled in tranches with other debts and traded for a fraction of their total value. Gokey thought if he could cobble together $5,000, he\u2019d have enough to buy up to $1 million of debt. It could be another art project. He spent the next nine months researching how to go about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eventually he started calling debt buyers. \u201cNormally, it\u2019s a waste of time for them to do a deal that\u2019s, like, under $30,000. And so I kept saying, like: Will you sell me just like $50 worth of debt just so I can learn how to do this? And they would just hang up on me.\u201d The buyers were aggressive\u2014all of them men, none of them willing to engage with the thought experiment Gokey was presenting\u2014and the calls never lasted longer than a minute. This was new for Gokey, who was used to enthusiastic cross-disciplinary collaborations. A recent project of his had enlisted a biochemist to give him an oxytocin nasal spray and then help analyze the chemical contents of his tears. \u201cI\u2019d cold-call a brain scientist and say: Hey, can you help me? Can you help me take oxytocin? I don\u2019t know how to do this without getting myself in trouble. And at first, they\u2019re very skeptical and standoffish, and then they\u2019re like: Oh, this is so exciting. I want to help you. Which is why it was so strange when I started cold-calling debt buyers and got a completely different response. And just a total group of jerks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the buyers ran his own website with tips for getting into the field\u2014finding good debt to buy, avoiding scams, and so forth. This buyer (whose identity Gokey declined to reveal) was one of the people who had hung up on him\u2014several times. But then, weirdly, the buyer started \u00adGchatting him late at night. Sometimes he would talk about his family, sometimes the industry, and sometimes he would start spewing crazy antisemitic conspiracies. At last, Gokey persuaded this guy to sell him a small amount of debt: $14,000 worth in exchange for $446, a not-insignificant portion of Gokey\u2019s assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Months earlier, Gokey had told some of the other Occupy Student Debt Campaign members about his debt-buying plans. In fact, he\u2019d mentioned it to Ann Larson, an early member of the group, at that&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/annlarson.substack.com\/p\/chapter-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">very first OSDC event<\/a>&nbsp;back in November. Initially a bystander, Gokey had found himself pulled out of the audience and conscripted to perform in a mock \u201cgraduation day\u201d ceremony, dressed in a trash-bag gown and holding a placard listing his loan balance. Next to him stood Larson, who would soon become a close collaborator and colleague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI just remember thinking: This person is insane,\u201d Larson told me. \u201cIt was like one of these things when somebody\u2019s talking to you, and you just want to slowly back away.\u201d But once she understood the implications of what Gokey was proposing, she went down the rabbit hole herself. The student debtor Pledge of Refusal abjectly failed, garnering only a few thousand signatures, so the OSDC turned to personal debt in general, a huge component of the 2008 financial crash. The group wanted to find a way to bail out individuals just as the government had bailed out the banks. When Gokey came to them with his research into debt buying, they realized he\u2019d hit on something that could gain them publicity and build momentum for more structural change. Now calling themselves Strike Debt, the activists initially started with medical debt, purchasing&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-usa-occupy-debt\/occupy-wall-street-buys-15-million-of-americans-medical-debt-idUSBRE9AC00020131113\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">$15 million<\/a>&nbsp;owed by about 2,000 people. They sent the former debtors a letter announcing their windfall. All told, Strike Debt bought up $30 million worth of personal medical and private student loan debt that then just ceased to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Ann Larson joined the Occupy Student Debt Campaign before it even really existed, when it was just a few people meeting regularly in Zuccotti. As Occupy started, she was working as an adjunct in composition and literature at the City University of New York and elsewhere, and, like Gokey, she was alarmed by the amount of debt her students were taking out. But at the time, she said, there was \u201cno movement and no union you could join. It was just like, well, everyone is just going to be disgruntled individually by themselves.\u201d So she was immediately drawn to the calls for a mass mobilization against unjust debts that were coming from OSDC members like the sociologist Andrew Ross and Pam Brown, then a graduate student at the New School. When the group decided to organize its ill-fated pledge, Larson began learning to code and took over management of the OSDC website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.newrepublic.com\/6e98ea6a7de6d0e13dcfffde35e74b931a9c5706.jpeg?w=1400\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>At the time, there were just a few other core members: among them Gokey, Ross, Graeber, Brown, the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor, and Taylor\u2019s frequent artistic collaborator Laura Hanna (as well as some other members, like the academic and activist Amin Husain, who later left the group, along with Brown, when it divided largely over racial issues). They were working on launching Gokey\u2019s debt-buying project, which they\u2019d started calling the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/rollingjubilee.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rolling Jubilee<\/a>. The organizing took different forms: Collaborators gathered to hash out logistics at Brown\u2019s apartment and Ross\u2019s New York University office, and Larson started working \u201clike a dog\u201d to build a website and other infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Rolling Jubilee launched via a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2012\/11\/occupy-gets-focused-with-rolling-jubilee.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">livestreamed telethon<\/a>&nbsp;in 2012, on the one-year anniversary of Zuccotti\u2019s eviction. Hoping to raise $50,000, Taylor and Hanna rounded up a number of big-name guests, including Janeane Garofalo, performers from Fugazi and Sonic Youth, and Taylor\u2019s partner, Neutral Milk Hotel front man Jeff Mangum. The project, which quickly went viral, collected almost $200,000 through Larson\u2019s website before the event even started. At the close of the telethon, they\u2019d raised nearly $300,000, enough to abolish several million dollars of delinquent debt. \u201cAt the end, there was all this confetti, and I just had, like, sweat dripping down my forehead,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cBecause I was like, That\u2019s [$300,000] that we have to spend ethically, and we\u2019ve promised not to pay ourselves a cent. And we\u2019ve promised to have it be perfectly audited by professionals and be perfectly transparent. And it was a huge amount of work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among the more time-consuming and emotionally intense tasks was overseeing the email inbox, which fell to Larson and fellow organizer Winter Casuccio. \u201cMessages by the hundreds began pouring into Strike Debt\u2019s email accounts,\u201d Larson&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/annlarson.substack.com\/p\/chapter-five\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">wrote<\/a>&nbsp;online. \u201cThe majority were from people begging for help.\u201d \u201cAs a Catholic, I am praying,\u201d wrote a man named Tom. \u201cBut I feel that God has abandoned me and am entertaining bad thoughts.\u201d Larson and Casuccio tried to respond to every supplicant, but they weren\u2019t able to offer much other than sympathy. \u201cI\u2019m still traumatized over reading those messages,\u201d Larson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Luke Herrine was in law school at New York University when he fell into Strike Debt\u2019s web, after attending a meeting at the Judson Memorial Church, in Greenwich Village, across the street from the law school. He had been drawn to the issue after reading Graeber\u2019s book&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/1620\/9781612194196\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Debt<\/em><\/a>, which traces the history of the concept from the prehistoric to the present, arguing that the notion of debt is embedded in the social contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But amid the success of the Rolling Jubilee, Strike Debt was riven by what Andrew Ross called its \u201crace moment,\u201d a crucible common to Occupy working groups. Among other issues, some members felt that the Rolling Jubilee, initially conceived as a stunt, had grown too big. \u201cWhat to do with the money became a huge problem,\u201d Brown told me. Giving it to debt collectors, who would simply use it to buy more debt, risked boosting precisely the predatory system Strike Debt was trying to undermine. Conflict erupted when some, including Husain, suggested the money should go to other, more positive endeavors, like creating&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artscabinet.org\/repository\/interview-nitasha-dhillon-and-amin-husain-mtl-collective\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">land trusts in Detroit<\/a>, and that race should be centered. Strike Debt is \u201climited by not being multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural,\u201d Husain said in explaining his&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/defined-by-debt-how-the-strike-debt-movement-redefined-occupy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">departure<\/a>&nbsp;from the group. Unable or unwilling to surmount this disagreement, the collective essentially disbanded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Herrine, who had been helping Strike Debt organize events, moved on to other things. Sometime in the summer of 2014, he got a call from Larson and Hanna, who had helped reconstitute the group under the new name Debt Collective. Larson and Hanna were working with California-based students of Everest College, a subsidiary of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, who were accusing the company of fraud and protesting the debts they had incurred to attend. (Their claims were bolstered by suits filed against the school by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB10001424052702303532704579481173846670090\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">multiple<\/a>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/oag.ca.gov\/news\/press-releases\/attorney-general-kamala-d-harris-files-suit-alleged-profit-college-predatory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">state attorneys general<\/a>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.consumerfinance.gov\/about-us\/newsroom\/cfpb-wins-default-judgment-against-corinthian-colleges-for-engaging-in-a-predatory-lending-scheme\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Consumer Financial Protection Bureau<\/a>&nbsp;for predatory practices.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because for-profit schools rely&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blog\/brown-center-chalkboard\/2017\/01\/11\/how-much-do-for-profit-colleges-rely-on-federal-funds\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">almost entirely<\/a>&nbsp;on federal student loan dollars, they engage in a variety of schemes to get students to borrow huge sums to cover their inflated tuitions\u2014in many instances, students have testified that they were not even made aware of all the loans taken out in their names. Students of Corinthian also&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/grade-point\/wp\/2016\/09\/29\/feds-found-widespread-fraud-at-corinthian-colleges-why-are-students-still-paying-the-price\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">alleged<\/a>&nbsp;that the school had vastly goosed job and salary figures for graduates to lure students to enroll in its worthless programs. One of those students was Nathan Hornes, who called enrolling at Everest \u201cthe dumbest decision\u201d he\u2019d ever made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hornes\u2019s description of the swindle paints a grotesque picture: He said instructors would suddenly quit or get fired for trying to warn the students about the school. \u201cAnd then the next thing you know, the person who literally just took that class the quarter before is now teaching that class, but they\u2019re also still in school and taking other classes.\u201d Sometimes, he said, a class period consisted of playing Monopoly or hangman on the chalkboard. \u201cIt\u2019s the most absurd thing that\u2019s ever happened in my 30 years of living, and it\u2019s just like, I can\u2019t believe at 20 years old I thought this was OK.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two years in, Hornes tried to transfer out\u2014to the University of Southern California, Cal State, even Argosy and the University of Phoenix, two other for-profit schools, a fact he didn\u2019t realize\u2014but none would accept his credits. The Everest recruiters had told him his college costs would be covered by grants and scholarships, so he didn\u2019t feel much incentive to leave and start his degree over from scratch. He decided to stick it out. \u201cSo I graduate in April, May, and then I got a letter a couple of months later, and it said: Hey, you owe us $700, starting in October. And I was like, wait, what? How do I owe you money?\u201d He called the school to ask what was going on with these loans. \u201cAnd they\u2019re like, oh, yeah, by the way, we had to pull out loans for you guys.\u201d Hornes said he asked them, \u201cWait, why did you do that? Who signed off on that?\u201d When Hornes and his sister had enrolled, the school had helped him fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But, he said, he hadn\u2019t ever signed the financial aid forms. The school, it turned out, had done that for him. Now he owed $68,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Nathan Hornes enrolled at Everest College, the school helped him create an account with Federal Student Aid, but he hadn\u2019t ever signed the financial aid forms. The school, it turned out, had done that for him. Now he owed $68,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On graduation day, administrators told him he wouldn\u2019t be able to walk across the stage unless he signed a paper saying the school wasn\u2019t liable for helping him find a job and he relinquished the right to sue. The same day, a friend of his who was working for Everest while in school was fired\u2014having graduated, he was no longer necessary to boost their job-placement statistics. That\u2019s when Hornes decided to start organizing. In the week after he graduated, even before he found out about his debt, he met with a handful of other students at Klatch Coffee, just down the street from the campus, to figure out how to fight back. The group, which grew to 150 within a few weeks and kept adding students from other campuses in the area, soon decided to file a class-action lawsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the Debt Collective members learned of the plan from a newspaper article, Ann Larson told me, they said, \u201cThis is amazing. This is exactly what we\u2019ve been saying people need to do, and here they are doing it, without us even knowing.\u201d Larson and Hanna started contacting the students and talking to them about how they might organize their protest into something bigger. The students wanted to sue the schools, but they had signed arbitration agreements preventing them from taking legal action, and the majority of their student loan debt was issued by the federal government. \u201cYour target is the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C.,\u201d the organizers told them. \u201cIt was their job to make sure this didn\u2019t happen to you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Herrine began scrutinizing the text of the 1965 Higher Education Act for some recourse. In his research, he came across an item that intrigued him: a line added in the 1993 reauthorization of the act, which stated that students who had been defrauded or misled by their schools could assert a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdwallet.com\/article\/loans\/student-loans\/borrower-defense-repayment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">borrower defense to repayment<\/a>\u201d and have their federal loans canceled. Herrine was excited. It seemed to him that he had found in the law precisely the issue he was looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He called up Hanna and Larson. \u201cThe Department of Education\u2019s not just going to give it to you,\u201d he told them, \u201cbut we could find a way to get these debts canceled with some organizing and some creative strategy.\u201d The Debt Collective started organizing Corinthian borrowers through the Facebook group for the Everest Colleges Avengers (as the students called themselves), and, in the meantime, Herrine tried to figure out whether the Debt Collective could use the borrower defense provision to petition the Department of Education to cancel the Corinthian students\u2019 federal student loan debt. Deanne Loonin and Robyn Smith, two longtime student loan experts he consulted at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nclc.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">National Consumer Law Center<\/a>, said it could; indeed, they had fought for years to get the department to use it for their own clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But because the department had never really planned for this provision to be employed on a large scale (or perhaps at all), there was no internal process in place for how to apply it. So the group set about creating a process themselves\u2014designing an application for loan relief that they could collect from borrowers and submit to the Department of Education. The main objective was to make a form that couldn\u2019t be scrutinized to death by the department: There would be no appeals to specific legal circumstances, and the complaint wouldn\u2019t try to parse individual levels of fraudulence, nothing that could become a sticking point for broad cancellation. The idea, Herrine said, was \u201cto make the simplest possible application.\u201d Once they had drafted something they agreed on, the group created a website and began collecting submissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Their efforts started drawing media attention. By December 2014, the idea of using borrower defense had reached Senator Warren, who called on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to use it to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/quicktakes\/2014\/12\/11\/senators-want-loan-discharges-corinthian-students\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">cancel the Corinthian students\u2019 debts<\/a>. To apply more pressure, the Debt Collective organizers decided to launch a formal debt strike. \u201cThese borrowers aren\u2019t paying anyway\u2014they\u2019ll say they\u2019re striking,\u201d Herrine said. \u201cWhy not turn inability and unwillingness to pay into a collective action?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With some grant money they had received, the Debt Collective flew the small group of students, whom they began calling the Corinthian 15, out to San Francisco, where they all roomed together in an Airbnb. Legal experts at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/ebclc.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">East Bay Community Law Center<\/a>&nbsp;in Berkeley offered a know-your-rights training to inform the borrowers of the repercussions for them if they let their loans default, and at night everyone shared their debt stories. \u201cIt was just a deeply powerful and emotional space, where people were able to talk about the pain of having debt for the first time,\u201d Herrine said, \u201cand to think about the possibility of resistance. To me, these are the moments in organizing that are the most amazing, where you see people have this experience of being like, oh, this is not my fault.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Once the Corinthian debt strike had garnered some press (including on the website of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/121706\/corinthian-100-student-debt-strikers-blast-education-department\">this magazine<\/a>, in May 2015), the Debt Collective harnessed it for a bigger push to cancel the borrowers\u2019 debts en masse. They got the attention of Rohit Chopra, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where Herrine had spent the summer of 2014 as a legal intern. In March, Chopra set up a meeting among Debt Collective organizers, Corinthian borrowers, and officials from the Education and Treasury departments. \u201cThat meeting sort of shifted the tide,\u201d Herrine said, \u201cbecause there was a lot of press.\u201d Herrine had brought a red-painted cardboard box filled with debt-relief applications printed at his law school, and at the end of the meeting he slammed it down on the table, to muted bumfuzzlement from the administrators in attendance. Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, who agreed to take the box, made some unconvincing promises to look into the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although the department was initially evasive and noncommittal, increased media coverage had begun to focus public scrutiny on the department\u2019s inaction. Eventually, the Debt Collective managed to persuade someone at the department to provide an email address for borrowers, so they could send their applications directly to their creditor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the middle of the debt-strike campaign, Corinthian&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/05\/05\/education\/for-profit-corinthian-colleges-file-for-bankruptcy.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">filed for bankruptcy<\/a>. Once it collapsed, the Department of Education focused on recouping as much of its own money as possible, not helping defrauded students. Yet as the applications for relief began flooding in, the press started asking what Herrine called \u201chard questions about why they weren\u2019t canceling these people\u2019s debts.\u201d \u201cWith abundant evidence of fraud available at both the federal and state levels,\u201d the&nbsp;<em>New York Times<\/em>&nbsp;editorial board&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/09\/27\/opinion\/sunday\/speedy-help-for-victims-of-college-fraud.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">chided<\/a>&nbsp;in September 2015, \u201cit\u2019s perplexing that the federal government has not promptly granted loan forgiveness for at least some of the people with complaints.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, several months after the Debt Collective launched its campaign, Secretary Arne Duncan announced that students of Corinthian and other provably fraudulent schools, like ITT Tech, would get relief under borrower defense. But it took more than a year for the department to hash out the terms of the new regulation, and the rules, finalized in October 2016, weren\u2019t set to go into effect until the next summer. Larson and others maintain that, after delaying relief for months, the department was continuing to drag its feet in discharging Corinthian loans, perhaps hoping to pass the work off to a future Hillary Clinton administration. (In fact, a month before the 2016 election, Elizabeth Warren sent a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.warren.senate.gov\/newsroom\/press-releases\/in-light-of-troubling-new-data-sen-warren-demands-education-department-halt-collection-of-former-corinthian-students-and-039-debt-and-discharge-their-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">searing letter<\/a>&nbsp;to then Secretary of Education John King, noting that the department had forgiven only 4,000 borrowers and was still aggressively collecting on nearly 80,000 delinquent Corinthian loans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then we got Betsy DeVos, who made undoing borrower defense a top priority of her term and spent almost the entirety of her tenure as secretary trying to make good on that promise. DeVos announced that she would approve claims from defrauded for-profit students \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/newsletters\/morning-education\/2019\/07\/10\/for-profit-enrollment-rises-and-so-does-student-debt-new-federal-data-shows-455313\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with extreme displeasure<\/a>,\u201d then stopped processing claims altogether, and eventually changed the rules and tried to issue only partial loan discharges. But judges repeatedly ruled against the administration in lawsuits brought by state AGs and the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/predatorystudentlending.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Project on Predatory Student Lending<\/a>, a group formed at Harvard, and ultimately DeVos failed to completely circumvent the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>After Luke Herrine approached Deanne Loonin and Robyn Smith about borrower defense, the pair submitted a memo on behalf of borrowers. In it, they argued that there would be no legal barrier to adopting the policy, because the Higher Education Act also allowed for executive action to compromise, modify, or waive any federal student loan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This provision was news to Herrine, but when he realized it existed\u2014it had been in the HEA from the moment it was signed into law in 1965\u2014he wondered why it wasn\u2019t being used more broadly. Perhaps, he thought, this provision could be used to cancel&nbsp;<em>all<\/em>&nbsp;student debt, not just the debts of defrauded for-profit students. Herrine devoted some time to the question and published a series of blog posts at&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregreview.org\/2017\/01\/04\/herrine-the-department-of-educations-power-to-cancel-student-debt\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Regulatory Review<\/a>&nbsp;defending his premise\u2014that, using a power akin to a prosecutor\u2019s discretion to waive pretrial detention, the Department of Education could voluntarily eliminate an individual borrower\u2019s federal student loan debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His idea hit at a novel political juncture: the cusp of a presidential primary that would serve to elevate a number of leftist policy proposals, including student loan debt relief. At some point, Herrine was in touch with Julie Margetta Morgan, a longtime advocate of student debt relief who has argued, with economist Marshall Steinbaum, that a college degree has lost its value as a wage amplifier, and thus often saddles its recipient with more burdens than benefits. Morgan, then at the Roosevelt Institute, asked Herrine to write a white paper for the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/greatdemocracyinitiative.org\/press-release-a-presidential-pathway-to-student-debt-relief\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Great Democracy Initiative<\/a>, a left-leaning policy shop that she had co-founded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few months later, Morgan was a policy adviser on Elizabeth Warren\u2019s presidential campaign, and, lo and behold, last January the senator announced a student loan cancellation policy relying on the provision Herrine had written about. Warren was calling for the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.warren.senate.gov\/newsroom\/press-releases\/schumer-warren-the-next-president-can-and-should-cancel-up-to-50000-in-student-loan-debt-immediately-democrats-outline-plan-for-immediate-action-in-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">cancellation<\/a>, by executive action, of up to $50,000 per borrower. (A Warren staffer confirmed that the idea came from Morgan, who was recently appointed to a position in the Education Department.) Suddenly, debt cancellation was everywhere. Each of the Democratic primary candidates addressed the issue, albeit often pathetically: Amy Klobuchar was against it, Pete Buttigieg was evasive, and before becoming Biden\u2019s VP pick, Kamala Harris (who had sued Corinthian as attorney general of California) tweeted out her support for $20,000 in cancellation \u201cfor Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities\u201d\u2014i.e., unicorns. After the election, pressure continued to mount: In early February, Schumer and Warren joined Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, and others in the House on a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/ourfinancialsecurity.org\/2021\/02\/joint-statement-coalition-applauds-bicameral-resolution-calling-on-biden-to-cancel-50k-of-student-debt\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">resolution<\/a>&nbsp;calling for Biden to cancel $50,000, which was supported by the NAACP, the American Medical Student Association, and dozens of other organizations, along with a third of all state attorneys general. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter and Instagram with a step-by-step guide for pressuring representatives to take up the mantle. \u201cWe cannot take no for an answer,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.newrepublic.com\/4389bf3ef91b52938bd710bb8b4a36129e0a6280.jpeg?w=1400\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In the wake of this moment, just before the election, the Debt Collective began working on a new campaign, the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/biden100.debtcollective.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biden Jubilee 100<\/a>: 100 student debt strikers for the first 100 days of Biden\u2019s presidency, each echoing a call for full student debt cancellation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump inadvertently paved the way for executive debt cancellation when he directed DeVos to extend the CARES Act\u2019s pause on federal loan payments and interest accrual. (Joe Biden further extended the pause through September 2021 on his first day in office.) Unless he was using the compromise\/waive\/modify provision, Trump seemingly had no authority to extend the pause. So if the Department of Education&nbsp;<em>could<\/em>&nbsp;halt collection under the provision, and Trump had apparently just asserted that it could, why couldn\u2019t it cancel the debts altogether?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On its way out the door, the Trump administration attempted to set the record straight in a memo arguing that in cutting interest rates to zero, DeVos had made use not of the compromise provision but rather another part of the Higher Education Act that governed economic hardship deferment, as well as the HEROES Act of 2003; using the compromise statute to cancel student debt by executive action, the administration insisted, would be unconstitutional. In a video conference with staff, Betsy DeVos&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/betsy-devos-pleads-with-staffers-to-be-the-resistance-under-biden-report-says\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">urged<\/a>&nbsp;Education Department lifers to \u201cbe the resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Broad cancellation would provide a massive stimulus to the economy by directing what would otherwise have been debt payments to consumer spending of all kinds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the Debt Collective, this was just the Trump administration spitefully trying to slam shut a door it had, by its own occasionally useful incompetence, swung open. Moreover, cancellation would be good policy, however it was achieved. Not only were people hurting because of the pandemic\u2014having to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/biden-transition-updates\/2020\/11\/17\/935743741\/biden-wants-to-help-pay-some-student-loans-but-theres-pressure-to-go-further\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">choose<\/a>, as Biden said, \u201cbetween paying their student loan and paying the rent\u201d\u2014but broad cancellation would provide a massive stimulus to the economy by directing what would otherwise have been debt payments to consumer spending of all kinds. One&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.levyinstitute.org\/publications\/the-macroeconomic-effects-of-student-debt-cancellation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">study<\/a>, by Bard College\u2019s Levy Economics Institute, estimates this could be as much as $1 trillion over 10 years. It would allow people to make choices currently foreclosed by their debts, such as buying homes, getting married, having children, going into low-paying public service positions; it would help redress the racial wealth gap; and, if combined with measures like College for All, it would finally begin to move our higher education system to one that, as in the vast majority of the developed world, does not finance itself through the iterative indenture of its young people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Those who object to canceling student debt usually point to income quintiles: People with large quantities of debt\u2014i.e., people who went to graduate school\u2014are more likely to earn high incomes. Some critics even argue that cancellation would be \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blog\/up-front\/2019\/04\/24\/how-progressive-is-senator-elizabeth-warrens-loan-forgiveness-proposal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">regressive,<\/a>\u201d that it would give the biggest boost to high earners and those privileged enough to go to college in the first place. Conservatives often cite the unfairness of forgiveness for those who saved for college or already paid off their debts (a critique that could be levied against all progress)\u2014or the burden on the elusive \u201ctaxpayer,\u201d as though student debt isn\u2019t itself a regressive tax (paid with interest) imposed upon those who can\u2019t afford to pay outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what is the taxpayer burden, anyway? Because student loans represent money already spent, forgiving them would have no effect on the national debt, although it would raise the annual budget deficit, which takes into account the expected repayment on those loans. (This amount is already limited by the Education Department\u2019s own estimates that a third of the student loan portfolio is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2020\/11\/25\/devos-education-department-estimates-large-student-loan-losses-figures-arent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">junk<\/a>\u2014in other words, uncollectible.) To account for this shortfall in their campaign plans, Sanders proposed taxing Wall Street trades, and Warren rolled out an \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/elizabethwarren.com\/plans\/ultra-millionaire-tax\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ultra-millionaire tax<\/a>.\u201d If Biden decides to test his authority to cancel student debt, it will be up to Congress to recoup the costs with presumably similar tax plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among those who support some amount of cancellation, $10,000 and $50,000 have emerged as headline figures. These numbers are a little bit arbitrary, but not entirely so: Supporters of the $10,000 figure&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdwallet.com\/article\/loans\/student-loans\/bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-could-wipe-out-debt-for-15-million-borrowers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">argue<\/a>&nbsp;that it would benefit the majority of borrowers currently in default (who are disproportionately Black and paradoxically tend to have the lowest balances, often because they never completed their degrees), while sparing wealthy borrowers. They\u2019re countered by researchers who have found that $50,000, with phaseouts for higher earners, would leave about 80 percent of current borrowers debt-free while doing the most to close the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/essay\/student-debt-cancellation-should-consider-wealth-not-income\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">racial wealth gap<\/a>\u2014though, because of Covid, this sweet spot has actually gone up to $75,000. Others, like economist Darrick Hamilton and public health scholar Naomi Zewde, continue to tout&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/02\/01\/opinion\/student-debt-cancellation-biden.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">full cancellation<\/a>, focusing on wealth over income and emphasizing \u201cthe added burden that a long history of discriminatory policy places on borrowers of color.\u201d Black Americans, who typically start out with one-eighth the family wealth of their white classmates, must take on debt in higher numbers, and they graduate with roughly double the amount of debt. Then, if they wish to overcome persistent racial and gender wage gaps, Black and female borrowers must credentialize to higher levels than their white, male counterparts\u2014perhaps going on to earn an expensive grad degree just to start at a bachelor\u2019s-level salary. In other words, they pay more for their degrees and earn less from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What these numbers don\u2019t convey is the extraordinary psychological and emotional toll of debt, as I learned from Biden Jubilee strikers. Anecdotes aren\u2019t data, but the anecdotes are nevertheless compelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Take Richelle, a 33-year-old Black woman working as a teacher in South Los Angeles. After years struggling through a series of setbacks\u2014two pregnancies right out of high school, when she was enrolled at a local community college; a nursing degree she discovered was worthless because ongoing legal issues kept her from getting licensed; struggles with rent; moving in with her mom; and all the mundane challenges of being a single working mom and trying to go to school\u2014she emerged in 2018 with a doctorate in education and took a job as a principal at the public charter school where she\u2019d been teaching for three years. She was making $85,000 a year, still not really enough to cover her $3,000 monthly rent, student loans, and other bills, but enough that she no longer had to take out payday loans every month. Then, in 2020, her school\u2019s charter wasn\u2019t renewed, and it closed down. Just before the pandemic, she moved back in with her mom and returned to teaching, working remotely as a STEM teacher in another public charter middle school, which came with a $20,000 pay cut. Meanwhile, with interest, her student loans are now more than $200,000. Instead of creating intergenerational wealth, she\u2019s poised to pass on a legacy of debt to her two children, who both dream of attending Howard University. How will she save for their college educations if she can\u2019t pay off her own loans, and if her debt keeps her from ever being able to build equity through a retirement account or by buying a house of her own?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or look at Rebekah Valorn, who was homeschooled in rural Wisconsin until the age of 16, then lived at home while going to a state school for environmental science. She graduated without student debt in 2007, but she didn\u2019t manage to find a job in her field before the recession hit and the work dried up altogether. So she decided to go on to grad school, and when that didn\u2019t help her get a leg up either, she returned to school for a law degree, focusing on environmental issues. \u201cI finished my graduate degree in 2010,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd the economy had not gotten any better.\u201d By that point, she said, higher-level engineers who had been laid off had flooded the market for the entry-level mechanical drafting and other tech jobs. \u201cSo after another year, poverty, and forbearance, I said fuck it. I already had about $30-ish\u2013thousand in student debt. And when I ran the calculations, like, this is just going to be in an income-based payment for however many years it takes. So I might as well go on to more school. Which I know is that dreaded moral hazard.\u201d Critics of cancellation often point to the \u201cmoral hazard\u201d risk, by which they usually mean that creating an expectation of eventual forgiveness will leave students with no incentive to control borrowing, nor schools to control tuition. \u201cBut how did education become a moral hazard issue? Like, what is immoral about wanting more education?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>The Debt Collective\u2019s perspective on student debt is moral and absolute, which is both clarifying and a little scary. The group starts from a premise that I share: that financing higher education by asking the non-wealthy to take on increasingly unmanageable levels of debt is wrong. Education ought to be a right of citizenship in a wealthy, humane, democratic society. Its effects are not limited to enhancement of the individual receiving it\u2014intellectual, financial, cultural, social, or otherwise\u2014but benefit us all by creating an astute citizenry and a populace whose members are well matched to their interests and labor goals. Therefore, education ought to be provided as a public good. Student debt shouldn\u2019t exist in the first place. So, obviously, we should get rid of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Starting from this point neutralizes much of the hand-wringing and arcane number crunching around the idea of debt cancellation. If the whole debt-financing system is regressive, how could it also be regressive to dismantle it? But this simple moral salvo tumbles a house of cards that is at best daunting to address. It isn\u2019t enough to cancel all existing student debt. Although this would be the biggest single welfare provision the government has ever offered, it would also be a onetime stimulus, and tomorrow the debt counter would start ticking up all over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The current proposals from the Biden camp and in Congress generally steer clear of this minefield, by tying their cancellation to Covid-relief measures, gesturing not so much at the broken system as at the specific hardships generated by a once-in-a-lifetime calamity. But there have been some interesting glimmers of intrigue. Before the Democrats mounted&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/livecoverage\/georgia-senate-runoff-elections-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surprise wins<\/a>&nbsp;in both Georgia Senate seats in a January runoff election, there was a consensus in Washington that Biden was likely to cancel some, presumably paltry, amount of federal student debt by executive action. But when the Senate flipped after the Georgia results, the calculus changed. Biden had been on the record as dubious about executive cancellation and was known to prefer legislative action. Now such action was possible, if a long shot. Not only had the Senate gone blue, but Bernie Sanders was&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2021\/01\/12\/bernie-sanders-big-budget-plans-458461\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">chair<\/a>&nbsp;of the Budget Committee, responsible for drafting reconciliation bills, which Biden could use to pass legislation unlikely to surmount the filibuster. The initial $1.9 trillion Covid relief package passed in March didn\u2019t offer student debt relief, but it did stipulate that any future forgiveness\u2014wink, wink, Joe\u2014wouldn\u2019t be taxed as income.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, a coalition of legislators continued to urge executive cancellation of $50,000, while Biden gravitated insistently toward $10,000, preferably via Congress. In early February, Jen Psaki, Biden\u2019s press secretary, tweeted that the president was \u201creviewing whether there are any steps he can take via executive action.\u201d At a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/briefing-room\/speeches-remarks\/2021\/02\/17\/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-cnn-town-hall-with-anderson-cooper\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">town hall<\/a>&nbsp;a few weeks later, Biden offered a confusing defense of $10,000, suggesting that he didn\u2019t believe he was able to cancel more, and that canceling \u201cdebt for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn\u201d would come at the expense of early-education programs for poor children. The remarks earned him widespread rebuke on Twitter. \u201cVery wealthy people already have a student loan forgiveness program,\u201d wrote AOC. \u201cIt\u2019s called their parents.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She\u2019s right. Maybe 5 percent of American students attend an elite school, even fewer an Ivy (less than 0.5 percent), and those who do generally aren\u2019t saddled with huge loan balances. Only 7 percent of Harvard undergrads take out any loans at all. The vast majority of America\u2019s college students attend public universities, the kind that used to be free but now find their students squatting in the libraries. The largest single source of federal student debt is the University of Phoenix. And sure, the boomers might shake their fists and shout about government handouts, but then again they might not, since as the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/communityimpact.com\/dallas-fort-worth\/lewisville-flower-mound-highland-village\/economy\/2019\/12\/04\/report-americans-age-65-and-over-are-fastest-growing-demographic-of-student-loan-debt-borrowers\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">fastest-growing demographic<\/a>&nbsp;with student debt (mostly parent loans), they\u2019re likely to be in debt themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Millennials, on the other hand, having been screwed twice in two decades, might reward the Democrats for taking them out of the red for years to come. Almost half of millennials have student debt, and along with the zoomers and the post-zoomers, they make up half the U.S. population. That\u2019s a lot of future voters. Yes, it would be manifestly unfair to cancel debt for millennials while leaving the coming generations to die on the vine. But that\u2019s also what\u2019s politically brilliant about it: Canceling the debt of one group might impel a one-two punch, accelerating the push for a comprehensive free-college bill that would help lift American higher education to its once-promised glory. It may not win over many hearts on Wall Street, but isn\u2019t that sort of the point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Millennials, having been screwed twice in two decades, might reward the Democrats for taking them out of the red for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Biden apparently hasn\u2019t gotten the memo, but his staff may have. The day before Psaki\u2019s tweet, the Biden team had announced nominations to the Education Department of several borrower and pro-cancellation advocates, including Julie Margetta Morgan, the National Consumer Law Center\u2019s Joanna Darcus, and Tariq Habash, of the Student Borrower Protection Center. Biden had already nominated Rohit Chopra to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Perhaps he will do something big and bold on student debt, Mitch McConnell and gauzy fantasies of bipartisan accord be damned. But only time will tell, and every day, that debt counter just goes up and up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the meantime, the leaders, if you can call them that, of the Debt Collective remain tireless, but they are so, so tired. Tired of fighting, tired of reading harrowing emails from sad and broken people, tired of putting their lives on hold for a struggle they just can\u2019t give up. They would like to feel that their work has meant something\u2014and is no longer necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps something is finally shifting, if slowly. On day 58 of the Biden Jubilee 100 campaign, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/education\/2021\/03\/18\/student-loans-borrower-defense-cardona\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">announced<\/a>&nbsp;that the department would provide full discharges to about 72,000 borrower defense applicants, mostly former Corinthian and ITT Tech students. It wasn\u2019t the end of student debt, and it certainly underscored the bravado of the 100 days demand, but it struck $1 billion from credit scores and the rolls of debt collectors, and it never would have happened if 15 debt strikers and a handful of organizers hadn\u2019t decided, the better part of a decade ago, that they simply weren\u2019t going to take no for an answer. As Thomas Gokey recently said to me on a Debt Collective campaign call: \u201cWe can\u2019t win what we don\u2019t organize for.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/authors\/ryann-liebenthal\">Ryann Liebenthal<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ryannliebenthal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&nbsp;@ryannliebenthal<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryann Liebenthal\u2019s first book,\u00a0<em>Overdue: The Shameful History of America\u2019s Student Debt Crisis<\/em>, will be published in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>(Submitted by JP Massar)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ryann LiebenthalApril 19, 2021 (NewRepublic.com) 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&#8230;. <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/04\/20\/the-long-fight-to-cancel-student-loans\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18460,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions\/18460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}