What A Birthday Party! Occupy Abolishes Almost $4M in Student Loan Debt As the result of an unprecedented search and destroy campaign by Occupys Strike Debt Working Group and their Rolling Jubilee (RJ) team, 2,761 individuals have been unburdened of their student debt to the tune of $3,856,866.11. This was announced in a one-page press release this morning, timed to coincide with Occupys celebration of its third birthday. The campaign will also be coordinated with public declarations by students and debt collectivists who have aligned themselves with this cause on the west coast. The backstory on the student debt purchase is equally as interesting as the accomplishment itself. Strike Debt truly did have to search before they could destroy, NYU Professor and Strike Debt activist Andrew Ross tells us. Its not all that easy to locate and buy student debt on the debt sales market. It is so lucrative that few debt collectors want to give it up, he explains. The second challenge was in the intricacies of dealing with the debt selling industry and the response of Sallie Mae (the company which packages and sells defaulted loans on the secondary debt market), which bristled at the thought of debt being bought by an outsider for the sole purpose of being abolished. Strike Debts Rolling Jubilee (RJ) member, Thomas Gokey, experienced this first-hand while searching out student debt to purchase. In a phone conversation with Doug St. Peters, VP of Portfolio Sales at Sallie Mae, the officer confirmed that student debt was sold to two major debt buying companies. But, when told that RJ was interested in buying -- and abolishing -- anything Sallie Mae might offer for purchase, the aptly named St. Peters (standing at the golden gates of debt collections) refused to entertain any such notion. That debt was going to go directly to collection agency hell. Salvation, much less purgatory, was not on the table. (more at link) huff.to/YTnRW7
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:52:44 +0000