For a year and a half, 80-year-old Kentucky resident Shirley Logsdon received repeated calls from a debt collection agency over an unpaid medical bill. Then one day, out of the blue, she received a letter saying the $983 debt had been handled — purchased by Rolling Jubilee, a group linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement. “I was dumbfounded but delighted, of course,” Logsdon, who is retired along with her husband of 62 years, told AFP. “We got a letter saying that everything had been resolved — finally it is over, you don’t have to worry, you don’t owe us anything. (…) I didn’t know these people. It was a godsend.” So what is Rolling Jubilee? The group is an outfit launched just a year ago by former Occupy Wall Street members now grouped under the nationwide Strike Debt collective. “Together we can liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will and collective refusal,” it says on its website, rollingjubilee.org. The idea? Buy up the personal debt of those who are struggling to fulfill their basic needs, like health care or housing. For the New York-based group’s first anniversary, it announced this month that in one fell swoop it had bought up the equivalent of nearly $13.5 million in medical debt that some 2,693 people owed to hospitals and medical offices. The group purchased the debt for only $400,000 — mainly paid for by small donations made to the organization over the Internet. MH
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 06:11:44 +0000
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