[Though not nearly enough, the president’s move is a good
one—and is the result of a decade-plus of activism by thousands of
brave Americans. ]
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THE REAL HEROES BEHIND BIDEN’S STUDENT DEBT ANNOUNCEMENT  
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Astra Taylor
August 26, 2022
The New Republic
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_ Though not nearly enough, the president’s move is a good
one—and is the result of a decade-plus of activism by thousands of
brave Americans. _

Occupy Student Debt, pameladrew212 (CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

On Wednesday, President Biden announced
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he would use his executive power to wipe out up to $10,000 in student
loans for 43 million Americans, and up to $20,000 for those who
received Pell Grants to attend college. A decade ago, if you had told
me that Joe Biden, a man who during his long career as senator helped
expand the student lending industry and worked to strip student
borrowers of bankruptcy protections, would one day be president and
eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt, I would
have scoffed—even as I was throwing my lot in with the movement that
would fight doggedly to make this happen.

Make no mistake about it, this represents a landmark victory for
student debtors. Through years of tireless and often thankless
organizing, borrowers and their allies pushed a reluctant
administration
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deliver broad-based student debt cancellation—to bail out regular
people, not big banks or businesses. Approximately 20 million people
will have their balances completely wiped out, and many have been
sharing emotional messages of shock and jubilation online.

Yet the triumph is bittersweet. For millions of others, including most
members of the Debt Collective [[link removed]]—the
union for debtors I helped found—$10,000 or even $20,000 doesn’t
begin to chip away at the interest that has capitalized on their
balance sheets, and it won’t reduce their monthly payments. Experts
warn that many won’t get the relief they are entitled to due to the
application process that attends the income cap. As one older debtor
who owes over six figures told me, the plan is a “coupon that’s
not worth clipping.” The NAACP tweeted
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similar sentiment: “Canceling $10,000 of student debt after
‘considering’ it for more than a year and a half is like waiting
on hold for 6 hours only to get a 5% refund.” The low dollar amount
and unnecessary bureaucratic hoops—and the fact that the application
is not yet available to borrowers—makes me worry the policy might
wind up being less popular, and thus less of a win for Democrats, than
it would have been if more generous cancellation was granted
automatically.

In the weeks and months ahead, we need to ensure that debtors are able
to access the relief they are entitled to. And we need to defend this
policy decision from bad-faith critics. Republicans such as Trump’s
billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
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Senator Mitch McConnell
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and Clinton-era economists such as Jason Furman and Larry Summers 
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all peddling debunked claims that debt cancellation is a handout to
the privileged that will grow the deficit and fuel inflation (even the
notorious socialists at Goldman Sachs have debunked these claims, and
the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said
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may well _reduce_ inflation). Finally, we need to ensure that this
announcement is a stepping stone, not a destination—a milestone on
the path to full student debt abolition and an overhaul of our higher
education system, including making public college free for all who
want to attend.

I believe that this is possible because I’ve seen what it took to
get to this point. Over 10 long years, a growing coalition
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debtors, lawyers, policy wonks, racial justice advocates, labor
unions, and progressive public officials have pushed the demand for
loan cancellation from the political margins to the mainstream. The
Debt Collective, in particular, expanded the Overton window
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bold tactics, including multiple successful debt strikes. Despite the
overwhelming stigma and judgment associated with indebtedness in this
country, debtors from all walks of life went public with their
financial struggles, said “enough is enough,” and got organized.
They signed petitions, disputed their debts, attended protests, and
declared their inability and unwillingness to pay—and, against the
odds, completely shifted the coordinates of the debate and, as of this
week, secured hundreds of billions of dollars in relief. In a rare
acknowledgment of the critical role of bottom-up mobilizing,
former President Obama tweeted
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the news was a “testament” to “all the activists who’ve been
calling for student debt relief for years.”

It’s easy to forget just how quixotic the demand for student debt
cancellation seemed when it first rang out during Occupy Wall Street a
decade ago, back when Obama was president. On April 8, 2012, members
of the short-lived Occupy Student Debt Campaign organized a protest
dubbed 1T Day
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marking the day student debt surpassed $1 trillion. Protesters dressed
in caps and gowns made of black trash bags and demanded a student loan
jubilee. Media coverage was scant and dismissive. “They want all
student debt in the country forgiven. All $1 trillion of it. And if
the government would be so kind, they’d appreciate it if it would
pay for higher education from here on out, as well,” Reuters’s
Chadwick Matlin jeered
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happened to this proposal? Hardly anybody has cared.” According
to NPR’s 
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Things Considered
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experts believe there’s little chance the government would ever
forgive student loans.”

Unlike the skeptics, my fellow occupiers and I didn’t see 1T Day’s
demands as particularly extreme. The government, after all, had just
bailed out the banks after they tanked the global economy and screwed
over millions of homeowners, including my parents, whose house was
underwater. At the time I was a recent student loan defaulter (though
I eventually paid off the loan in full—or rather, my partner paid it
for me, a liberation I want everyone else to experience). Why
shouldn’t former students like myself, who only did what they were
told by pursuing postsecondary degrees to get ahead, also get a
helping hand? All my peers and I wanted was what previous generations
had enjoyed: a chance to pursue higher learning debt-free.

With this goal in mind, we formed working groups to learn more about
the mechanisms of our highly financialized economy and began hosting
what we called “debtors’ assemblies,” heartrending forums where
strangers shared their financial woes. To visit an Occupy encampment
was to be surrounded by people behind on rent, mortgage payments,
medical and credit card bills, and student loans. Through conversation
and confession, our shame about being in debt began to dissolve; we
started to see our indebtedness not as a personal failing but as the
product of a failed system: one in which low wages, inadequate public
services, systemic racism and sexism, and profiteering conspire to
force the majority of us to borrow to meet our basic needs. To call
attention to these dynamics and to help debtors in need, we raised
crowdfunded donations and began purchasing portfolios of unsecured
debt on the secondary markets, erasing tens of millions of dollars of
medical bills and payday loans for tens of thousands of people across
the country. We called this grassroots bailout of the people, by the
people, the Rolling Jubilee
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Of course, we knew we would never be able to purchase and erase all of
the debt sloshing around, but I wasn’t entirely clear on next steps.
One afternoon, I expressed my reservations to my collaborators while
we were filming an agitprop video that involved various people,
including the artist Thomas Gokey and the late anthropologist David
Graeber—author of the unlikely 2011 blockbuster _Debt: The First
5,000 Years
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around a trash can at dusk burning fake debt notices while wearing
balaclavas. “What we need,” Gokey responded, having clearly
thought the question through, “is a debtors union.” I felt as
though a cartoon light bulb went off over my head. Just as workers
come together to fight for better wages and benefits, debtors needed
to get organized in order to fight for relief and changes to public
policy. If we got organized, perhaps we could turn our isolating
obligations into a source of shared leverage to demand change.

Two years later, the Debt Collective was officially launched when we
announced the country’s first student debt strike. Fifteen
students—Nathan Hornes, Latonya Suggs, Ann Bowers, Jessica Madison,
and others—who had been defrauded by the collapsing for-profit
chain Corinthian Colleges,
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public, refusing to pay back their loans and demanding full
cancellation from the Education Department. The Corinthian 15 caught
on in the media and even inspired an episode of the popular television
show _The Good Wife__._

Laura Hanna and Ann Larson were the campaign’s stalwart organizers
and brilliant strategists, crisscrossing the country meeting former
Corinthian students, whose striking ranks swelled; Wall Street
defector turned policy wonk Alexis Goldstein helped us navigate
Washington D.C.; law school student Luke Herrine connected us to
brilliant lawyers, including Eileen Connor, Toby Merrill, Robyn
Smith, and Deanne Loonin. Their work on predatory student lending
included powerful but underappreciated arguments about the Department
of Education’s various authorities to cancel federal student loans,
including a little-known provision called Borrower Defense to
Repayment, which says loans must be canceled when institutions mislead
students or violate state law—standard-issue fare for for-profit
schools like Corinthian. With their help, we created a mobile-friendly
website that allowed us to flood the department with Defense to
Repayment claims and forced the Obama administration to begin issuing
a trickle of relief.

The Corinthian campaign showed that debt cancellation was possible
(even if it would take seven years for our full demands to be met: In
June this year, the Biden administration finally granted the
automatic mass discharge the Corinthian strikers called for
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amounting to nearly $6 billion for over half a million people). In
early 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren, inspired by the Corinthian
example, made broad student debt relief a central plank of her
presidential primary run, followed by Bernie Sanders. Boxed in, Mr.
Biden reluctantly embraced student loan cancellation as well.

The wild card was Covid-19. The world-shaking pandemic got President
Trump to pause payments for the vast majority of federal student loan
borrowers. Tens of millions of people got accustomed to not making
monthly payments, and the experience showed that the federal
government could function just fine without student loan revenue.
Around the same time, the protests catalyzed by the murder of George
Floyd primed people to better understand the structural inequities
built into our debt-financed system of higher education, which
leaves Black borrowers
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particularly Black women, with the highest debt loads, making debt
cancellation a clear matter of racial and gender justice. By the time
President Biden took office, a diverse and growing coalition of
grassroots activists and civil society groups were committed to
ensuring he delivered on his promise.

With the student loan moratorium now extended to January 1, 2023, this
coalition must work to ensure payments never get turned on again. To
that end, thousands of people have signed up pledging to go on debt
strike should the administration attempt to restart the collection
system, committing to a path of noncompliance and nonpayment. A
significant subset of these strikers are in their sixties, seventies,
and even eighties. Contrary to the stereotype of young, upwardly
mobile borrowers, senior citizens are the fastest growing demographic
of student debtors, and some of the most desperate. The loans they
took out in hopes of achieving economic security in old age are
plunging them into deeper poverty and precarity.

In my 10 years in the trenches of debt abolition, I’ve heard more
jokes about dying in debt than I care to count—indeed, the typical
American ends life in the red, owing an average of $62,000
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I’ve met people who postponed retirement because they took out
Parent Plus loans to help their children, Black mothers crushed by
debt because they pursued higher education without family wealth to
draw on, college dropouts saddled with debt without the benefit of a
degree, dedicated teachers and nurses who owe more than $100,000 yet
aren’t eligible for existing Public Service Loan Forgiveness
programs. I’ve cried as people opened up about the psychological
stress of their debt and told me they considered suicide as the only
viable way out. I’ve seen Debt Collective members endure poverty,
homelessness, and worse as a result of the Department of Education’s
arcane and dysfunctional bureaucracy. While waiting for a refund of
her illegal wage garnishments
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Madison
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the original Corinthian 15 strikers, was unable to afford proper
medical care and died of cancer.

This is why the Debt Collective refuses to use the phrase “debt
forgiveness.” Borrowers are not to blame. The problem is our broken
economic and educational system, which indebts people by design,
ensnaring millions in traps made of capitalizing interest and
corrupting the Department of Education by turning it into a predatory
lender. It makes no sense to speak of forgiveness for those who have
paid many times the original principal, or who had to borrow for
college because their families lacked the wealth to pay for tuition up
front.

I’m glad President Biden has canceled some student debt
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I wish he had canceled much more. What happens next is a question of
both morality and math. This country’s debtors will never be able to
pay off the growing mountain of student debt that failed policies have
forced them to amass. From today’s vantage point, $1T Day seems
quaint. Even after this week’s landmark announcement, best estimates
put student debt at around $1.7 trillion
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and that number will swiftly tick back up.

But here’s the thing. This debt doesn’t need to exist, and at long
last, everyone finally knows that to be true. The American people will
never see student debt in the same way again. If the president can
cancel $10,000, he can cancel it all. And if we continue to keep
organizing, one day someone will.

_Astra Taylor [[link removed]] is a
filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. @astradisastra
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* Student Debt
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* Joe Biden
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* Debt Collective
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* Occupy Wall Street
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