Skip to content Skip to footer
|

Student Debt Crisis: It’s Time for a Jubilee

With soaring tuition, poor job prospects, and loans that take decades to pay off, thereu2019s no question that students need a year of jubilee.

Organizations that usually demand cancellation of the crippling debts owed by impoverished countries in the global South are now calling for debt forgiveness for a different group of borrowers: U.S. students.

With soaring tuition, poor job prospects, and loans that take decades to pay off, there’s no question that students need a year of jubilee. Yet, the idea that groups accustomed to running international solidarity campaigns have taken up their cause is an unexpected twist.

I’ve always liked the Jubilee debt campaign. For a couple of decades now, it has been an impressive and truly international drive, with strong leadership from the global South. In this country, the Jubilee USA Network has done a great job doing interfaith organizing and bringing in non-religious allies as well. Also, importantly, the campaign has been winning.

One of the great accomplishments of the global justice movement that exploded internationally around the year 2000 was to convince the world that onerous debts owed by poor countries were an unjust and prohibitive barrier to sustainable development. In many cases such debts were accumulated by dictators that had since been overthrown; moreover, developing countries had already paid back more than the original amounts of the loans. Belief in the injustice of this, as well as the idea that wealthy creditor countries and international financial institutions should cancel debts, represented radical fringe ideas in the first half of the 1990s. But Jubilee folks were dogged. They lobbied, educated, and protested. I remember many thousands of people turning out for a Jubilee march in Seattle, just before the main day of action against the World Trade Organization’s 1999 ministerial meeting. It was a rainy night, and it would have been easy to stay home; instead the packed protest foreshadowed what would become a historic week of action.

Pundits often accuse social movements—especially ones driven by highly visible protests—of emerging from nowhere and then disappearing without impact. Sometimes it is true that momentum-driven movements have short life cycles. But just as often, a “here today, gone tomorrow” analysis reflects the ignorance of a mainstream media commentator more than anything else. If you don’t bother to follow social movements until they’re too loud to ignore, and then you promptly resume disregarding them once they’re no longer making top headlines, it’s no surprise that you’ll miss the precedents and the legacies. “Flash in the pan” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the case of globalization activism, this was a common charge. But Jubilee’s steady track record provides a critical counterpoint. I tracked the Jubilee movement through some of its major wins of the past decade, and I responded to critics on the left who misread some victories as defeats. When G8 leaders signed a breakthrough debt relief agreement at the 2005 Gleneagles conference, Rebecca Solnit also wrote a nice essay crediting the Jubilee movement for its persistence:

In ‘98, I had gone to Birmingham to hang out with Reclaim the Streets (RTS), the raucous, wildly creative British movement that shifted the tone and tactics of direct action in many parts of the world and demonstrated early the power of the Internet for creating simultaneous demonstrations in many countries. At the same moment, Jubilee 2000 (now Jubilee Research) formed a vast human chain around the G8 and much of central Birmingham. RTS condemned the G8’s very existence; Jubilee 2000 asked it for something specific. At the time, I have to admit, the jubilee group made little impression on me, and their “Cancel the Debt” message seemed hopeful but remote.

Remote then, it has arrived now, as both a transnational awareness of the causes and costs of the loans forced on poor nations and as the recent debt cancellations. It is impressive to measure the migration of the idea of debt cancellation (and so, of the rich world’s role in creating poverty) as it traveled from outside the walls of Birmingham into Gleneagles to become the unavoidable topic. No less impressive is the way the early champions of debt relief took up such a complex, unglamorous idea and stuck with it for so long- long enough to matter, long enough to change the world.

Since then, Jubilee has continued to make forward progress, highlighting the misdeeds of “vulture funds,” among other things.

The intriguing question now being raised is, can the campaign translate its past penchant for success on the international scene into debt cancellation for U.S. students?

Jubilee USA wrote recently about how it came upon student debt as a new area of focus:

As the debt crisis continues to spread from the Global South to the North, we began hearing increasingly from our regional chapters, faith communities and individual supporters that we must also address issues around debt and lending in the US. As we continue to work on international responsible lending and borrowing and on the impact of debts in the developing world, we also are making connections to student loans in the US. The sense of austerity that has wreaked havoc on the poorest is also challenging too many of us at home.

A variety of commentators have noted the Biblical precedent of having a “Year of Jubilee” for debtors, and they have argued that students would be worthy beneficiaries of such a break. Groups such as the Backbone Campaign and Roots Action have taken up the cause. And relief of student debt has been a popular demand within the youth-heavy Occupy movement.

In June, Jubilee activists pushed members of Congress to extend a low interest rate on student loans. The extension passed in early July, giving students at least a temporary reprieve from having rates double.

It’s still a long road to a serious program of debt cancellation for students. I suspect this fight will have to be waged largely under the radar and sustained for years if it is to prevail. But if there’s ground for confidence, it’s that Jubilee and its allies have done that before.

Dissent is a quarterly, left-liberal magazine of politics and culture.

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.

You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.