Cowman
Cows Have Liberal Minds
- Nov 6, 2011
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One year later, Occupy has a brilliant new plan: A people’s bailout | Death and Taxes
I certainly know the kind of people around here that would HATE this sort of thing. They'd rather pay their debts off like honest hardworking folks.
It took a while, but a new offshoot group that grew out of Occupy called Strike Debt has a highly specific, highly brilliant plan for how to improve the lot of the 99%: It’s called Rolling Jubilee, and it’s basically a crowd-funding campaign to buy up big swaths of people’s debt and simply cancel it. It’s sort of like the economic equivalent of buying slaves to free them.
Here’s how it works: All kinds of debt, from student loans to credit card to mortgages, are sold by the people who originally made the loans to collectors eager for the chance to take the interest payments on those loans for years to come. Loans get bundled into big groups and sold as securities on the open market. Rolling Jubilee will raise money through crowd-funding and use that money to buy bundled loans like any other institution—but once they own the debt, rather than collecting on it they’ll simply cancel it.
You’ve probably heard of a simliar thing happening when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae buy mortgages from banks or debt collectors buy debt from credit card companies—one day in the mail you get a notice saying, Your debt is now owned by this guy—please keep paying. In this case, however, you’d get a note saying, Your debt is now owned by Strike Debt, and they’ve voided it—your balance is now $0.
Sound too good to be true? Well, there are a couple ways this doesn’t work: First, you can’t ask the Rolling Jubilee to please personally pay off your student loan. The Jubilee will be buying securitized debt bundles just like other institutions, which means they’re not targeting individual loans. Incidentally, the individuals paying these loans have no idea that they’ve been “bundled.” So while you may choose to donate to the Rolling Jubilee there is no guarantee that it’ll personally benefit you.
I certainly know the kind of people around here that would HATE this sort of thing. They'd rather pay their debts off like honest hardworking folks.
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