
Part of the Series
Moyers and Company
Last week, the members of Strike Debt, a group of Occupy activists working to help Americans dealing with debt, launched a new campaign called The Rolling Jubilee. The initiative — a clever plan to collect money, buy up other people’s debt and forgive it — kicked off on Thursday with a variety show in New York dubbed “The People’s Bailout.” The show, live-streamed over the Internet as a telethon, raised enough money to cancel over five million dollars of debt.
In canceling the debt, the Strike Debt team is taking advantage of a fairly common banking practice. When debt is severely distressed — that is, when debtors aren’t paying up – banks write the loans off their books. But they often sell the debt for less than the loan was worth to recoup some of their losses.
View a slideshow of the event.
Strike Debt is working with a debt purchaser to buy distressed medical debt for about five cents on the dollar. Then Strike Debt cancels it, freeing debtors who were unable to pay their medical bills.
Americans owe over $11 trillion in debt. Over $1 trillion of that is student debt. Sixty-two percent of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and that figure rose by 50 percent between 2001 and 2007.
The People’s Bailout featured over a dozen performers and speakers — folk singers, rappers, magicians, comedians, Catholic nuns, a professor, a journalist — all of whom appeared for free to help Strike Debt raise money and share the message that debtors are not alone. “Debt is a tie that binds the 99%,” was one frequently-repeated phrase. A large sign on the wall read “you are not a loan.”
The show closed with three songs performed by an unlikely pair: Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. Mangum has only started performing again recently after a decade of reclusion.
The name “The Rolling Jubilee” was based in the ancient idea of a “jubilee year.” “The jubilee … comes out of the Abrahamic religious traditions,” humorist David Rees, one of the masters of ceremonies, said. “The idea of abolishing debt — freeing slaves literally and metaphorically — is a very powerful, very human impulse that we want to update for our new century.”
There was an air of moral imperative — and, sometimes, religiosity — to the event: Two reverends spoke, a gospel choir sang and a group of Catholic nuns, the Sisters of St. Joseph, talked about debt.
During the evening, many of the performers suggested that, in the past few weeks, Occupy has honed in on a purpose, turning ideas into action through initiatives like the Jubilee and Occupy Sandy. At the People’s Bailout, the Strike Debt team hit their goal of raising enough money to purchase and cancel $5 million in debt, and the funds have continued to — well, roll in.
As of yesterday evening, Strike Debt had raised enough to abolish nearly $7 million of debt, and the Jubilee is still continuing. In this video featuring members of Strike Debt (including Linnea Palmer Paton and Amin Husain, both of whom appeared on Moyers & Company last year), the group explains their goals.
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.