From Debt to Society

funk that. I don't know who they're trying to find, yo, because I don't even know nobody who live in Ohio. So now I gotta ducking dodge you probably getting another job that want to get my neck? No battle, what's the cost? He collectors? I ain't paying you ship. Telly May Yeah, she stay on my dick. These niggas be up in my damns. She said. He trying to reap hiss my priest. But I'd be sipping orange so that

like my name was Keenan. You have to notice how everyone you used to vote, and all your family and your friends where y'all got the student loans. Everybody shares the pain. It's not just you a loan. That's while we always write these robs and give you all this moving pole. Imagine you're pulled over in the car for the map. You're the curse of the police to get fucking charged with the threat. You come the book and swept inside the carseral net. So now you got this

lawyer fees and finds carsoral debt. But if we all came together about the hundred thousands, we could get them to cancel all the mortgages on the houses. But it's only possible if you're willing to be loud and too people know you're done with that, no longer allow it. Yeah, fuck yeah, it's dope, knife, I'm legal, Francay. We are waiting on reparations. That was that was fired that I was still basking a little bit and forgot to say, Harry up, it's all good. So how you been, man, Man,

I've been good. Yeah, just same. We'll keeping up on this election fiasco while you know, trying to do my thing. But geez, you know, it's almost like you can't even really make any plans right now until the election gets resolved. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. When's that going to be I mean, I'm at least talking about election night. I mean, who knows how long that mess that old pipe dream which one election night? No,

I mean you know what, I don't know. I don't know now with the with the new poll numbers, I mean obviously none of this matters. Every you know, people gotta vote, you know, so poll numbers don't mean ship. But right now it's looking like he might not even really be able to achieve. But you know he's gonna try. But I'm just saying, and revised my previous statement in that on election night, we should know who are new d A is. We shouldn't know who our senators are

going to be, and that's definitely matters. Does stuff really really matters to take back the Senate? We have somebody who in Athens a least is going to be pushing for a sort of justice practices and for you know, not prosecuting like minor drug offenses and ship like that. That's the ship y'all gotta get out and vote for. It's like the down ballot races are the really important ones. If you want to see, like you know what I'm saying,

the real change happened. Yeah, like your carseral debt. We're talking about debt this week. If you're thinking about your lawyer fees you gotta pay and the fines you still owe the courts in the county and uh all that ship. That ship is not determined by who your president is. That's determined by who your d a ends up being, whether or not you go to jail for smoking weed or I don't know, doing doing a little math talking about debt, I mean, even the president of debt. I

can't believe. I don't even know if we were prepared to get into that in this episode, but we absolutely should not much to get into. President owes hundreds of millions of dollars and barely paid any taxes in the last ten years. Not much more to it. I gotta pay my I got six grand. I gotta pay my payoff on my car. I know friends that are still paying off on like d uys from almost a decade ago.

So and and here we have a president who just received world class medical care, the best medical care you can probably receive in the entire world, without having to pay a single penny. Thinking about how many people go into medical bankruptcy every year. You want to know what's even more wild, think about this. He didn't even pay for that ship. You did, like literally because this is this is like like he just got government run healthcare,

not government run health insurance. He got government run healthcare. Doctors are paid by the st the state. The lights were kept on on the crystal chandelier and his executive suite by the state, by us, by me, and you damn sure wasn't eager to drop any ducats on that ship. Then Nicka paid yeah, nothing, nothing. So all we're asking for is for all of us to receive that. I mean, I don't even need the chandelier, I don't even need the sixth room suite and the best doctor. Give me

a decent doctor for free. Fucking I'm there, I'm in. But that's what we're talking about this week, using our debts to organize for a better world where we all have access to free healthcare, we all have access to

free college and things like that. We are so this week we speak with Astra Taylor and author, documentarian, organizer with the decollective debt affects all of us, from those who make it big and mismanage their money and lose it all to those of us who've never had any in the first place, and the decollective offers a radical new organizing strategy for racing these that's and establishing a

new societal order where debt doesn't exist at all. So before we talk with Astro, we're gonna go through a couple of interesting stats and facts about debt in America and this debt based economy and what hip hop has had to say about it. All Right, So, per Business Insider, the average American debt totals fifty one thousand, nine hundred dollars, and that includes mortgage loans, home equity, lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debts, student loans, and personal loans.

Student loan debt in is now about one point five six trillion dollars. The latest student loan debt statistics from show how serious the student loan debt crisis has become for borrowers across all age demographics and age groups. Therefore five million borrowers who collectively owe almost one point six trillion dollars and student loan death in the US. Research shows that about a hundred and thirty seven point one million Americans have faced financial hardship because of medical costs.

According to a two thousand nineteen survey conducted by Gallup in the nonprofit West Health, Americans borrowed and estimated eighty eight billion dollars last year to pay for healthcare. In two thousand seventeen, the United States spent about three point five trillion dollars, or eighteen percent of the GDP, on health expenditures, more than twice the average among developed countries.

Of that three point five trillion dollars, one point five trillion is directly or indire actually financed by the federal government. Prison parole and probation operations generate about eighty one billion dollars in annual costs of the u S taxpayer, while police court costs, bail bonds fee, and prison phone fees generate another hundred billion dollars in court costs, and those

are paid by the individual. And so I've read a lot about out the way that like there's private companies that UH contract out to provision UH monitor ankle bracelets to people on probation or house arrest, and they have to then pay every month. And this is like an extra bill if they if they fall behind on paying the company for their ankle monitor they can get sent

back to jail. And so these cars rule forms of debt the you know, in addition to bail bonds, fees or court costs um but all of these things were involved with like probation and house arrest and like being on parole, like with like paying your roll officer and

things like that. Like in the fact that you can get sent back to jail if you don't pay them are like a really ominous and like a cruel form of debt that we put people into a country like that that it's like ship like that is why I'm not overly harsh on people who believe like wild conspiracy theories and ship like that, because the ship just seems deliberate.

You know what I'm saying. It feels like in this net that it's just like layers upon layers of deliberate fuckering to just make life as uncomfortable as it can possibly be. Said, A chill go down my spine. But do you likened like believing we live in this net to like a conspiracy theory? I was like, this isn't just what everyone believes. It's not everyone realized you live in this net where they're trying to drag us down

deeper and deeper. Would you would you say, it's commonly known that police, uh you utilize citations and the revenues they generate from that, and a lot of money from us and like little ways, not just from the president industrial complex, but just general revenue from finals and fees and uh forfeitures so a. Porting to a national database compiled by Governing magazine, at least five hundred and eighty three cities and towns have collected ten or more of

their general fund revenue from fines and forfeitures. Among those jurisdictions, eighty relied on fines to generate over half their budget revenue. Most of those municipalities came from just four states, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Yeah. I mean, if if Athens were you collect ten percent of our general fund revenue from fine cent forfitures, that'd be about thirty million dollars. Not that I I should know if that's true, but I don't

think it's that bad here um. According to the New York FEDS Household Debt and Credit Report from the fourth quarter of two thousand nineteen, Americans owed one point three three trillion dollars in outstanding vehicle debt. So financing these cars, I mean, not even these fancy cars. We live in such a car centric like infrastructure spear that just to live, you gotta go into debt to buy a car, just to be able to get to work. Like your car breaks down, you lose your job because you don't have

a stable form of transportation anymore. That means you can't pay rent, which means you become homeless, which means then you lose your kids, like you have, Like having a car is so critical, and so many like having a car.

It's like how many Yeah, so you have to Like you're you're paying your car off month after month, You've got your monthly payment, and then all you accidentally, like you get hit and then you've gotta and your insurance won't cover it, and now you gotta pay five hundred dollars and you already have like a three five car payment every month, and your insurance costs every month, and now you can't even use the car that you own,

but you still owe the fucking bank for it. That's one of my worst fears, not the worst, but like I think about it, So these are all topics I mean, from financing cars to financings moans that many rappers have touched on. And I just want to bring up how uniquely touched by this the hip hop generation is because older generations have, like I really feel like they have no idea what it's like to be this and debt. They grew up when they could get cheap loans for

houses to the Federal Housing Administration. College cost near to nothing before Reagan us to be graduated thousands in debt

into her reception. For the love of God, the prison industry didn't boom until then eight to the eighties and nineties, So all these fucking boomers got to like do all the drugs imaginable without being swept into the car sinoral net and you know, saddle with all these fines and fees and this debt, and then us we're just fucked spucks, and so like, I feel like, why perhaps in our investigation of like the lyric escape for this episode, there wasn't as much reference to debt as I might have

imagined given these realities. I mean, I think it speaks to hip hop somewhat as well, that like people don't want to flosol, they don't got They don't want to like flaunt what they lack, so like they're not I mean, they might be talking about getting out of debt, but they're not going to be like I gotta leave it on my car. But it's kind of like when we were talking about labor, you know, it's just it's just one of those no one to the fact they work

at dairy queen exactly. It's not necessarily I guess trope would be the right word to use for it. It's not necessarily a trope that's used in hip hop, the trope of like, um, well, maybe I should say mainstream hip hop, because you know what they're you know, I do, like you said, not necessarily rapping about being in But I definitely used to know a lot of indiects used to wrap about being broke. Yeah, and then we have a good example today, life and debt from Seattle spreaders,

blue scholars. I mean, they're more conscious for apperis and music and lyrics frequently focus on struggles with socioeconomic classes challenging authority. UM often rooted in the MC geologic history as an activist within the Filipino American community, dealing with

issues immigration, racism, US imperialism the Philippines. But in This Life and Debt, they talk explicitly about working class struggles like working a nine to five, eight hours a day, coming home, your bills are late, your interest accumulates, collection agency, waits paycheck to paycheck. Let's listen a little bit of this time working five. Sometimes they also find it really interesting that they have a subtle critique of like the

nonprofit industrial complex. At one point, he says, uh, five oh one c three community plantations, non nonprofit sector propped up to kill the movement for the changes in production relations. So he's talking about how like these charities that are meant to like you know, aid the poor really aren't impacting like the power dynamics and society or like who controls like the profits of like the working classes labor

and Uh. I just thought that was really interesting, I mean, especially with relation to like this idea of debt that we're talking about today, where so many things are privatized, education, housing market, getting a car, uh, healthcare that where we will rely on like the we're like we as the needy, like rely on nonprofits, like oh may I have some more please, like for the food banks and the diaper banks and the job skills training and the the homeless

shelters when it's not really like organizing us to push back on the fact that it's just really a rich, greedy fox are the reason why we don't don't have in the first place. Yea, for whatever reason. I don't know why. But the part where he's like, but woman, you're my comrade, ride or die and the revolution making other earth standing with me in the grocery line, I don't know why. I just love that you're my comrade part.

Just with the the whole tone of the song, it just kind of gives it like this sort of socialist flare. This is like, I don't know if that's what you've been by it, but I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna take it. Just another observation about the song. This is definitely one of those sort of songs and you probably could hear it when you heard the little snippet, but it's like, if you put it on, it's definitely something that could just be on and you would wouldn't even

think twice about what it's about. You just kind of that's a pleasant song. Samples and the dramatics like like that but then it's one of those ones were upon closer listening, you're like, oh, ship this is about Then what's the name of this that mass political, educational potential of hip hop? Or you just put the song on maybe twenty times in the car, then it like gradually radicalizes you just slowly. Yeah. Then we got New York rappers Sammy's with Schools Out. A lot of rappers touch

on particularly issue of student loans. I feel like a lot of like the post hip hop generation, not the first people to grow up with hip hop, but like the second generation of people grow up with hip hop. A lot of us grew up, we graduated into a recession where it's become difficult to make those payments on

the education we just received. Um. And so SAMs is one of many rappers that touches on the money that we all fucking Oh Sally, may students tap for another year at a name at home need to sneak around in the middle, Like you were talking about the generational divide in how we perceived debt to be and in her in the beginning of a verse, she was mentioning living at home with your parents because of student loans, and that's kind of something that I think is you know,

for people in our generation, is a lot more of a common theme and feeling like, I know, like my parents, Like the notion of oh, someone who's a grown man or woman moving back in with their parents still has a certain taboo to it, whereas for our generations, like, yo, you know how many bills we got, Like that just might be the necessity of hell bills our parents got and they're like, hey, why don't you stay living at

home with me? She later in the song talks about how she had to buy a new MacBook and like the need to like have access to really expensive technology just to like access to your access to your workforce, access to your schooling right now, etcetera. And so it's like so many bills following up in addition to as she references just purely what you got to pay to get your credit hours and build up your network to try to get a good job when you get out

of school. You mentioned how she references Sally May, which is a common reference in hip hop. Very yeah. So from Rhapsody to oil A Deonte Hitchcock, Big Cred Corday all over the place. In fact, in Corday has been around, uh he has. He does this interesting thing where he sort of he's like sort of just like Braggadoccio, a rhyman. But then he has this moment where he jumps back to like seeing I think in the I pertect, I

interpreted it as the perspective of a fan. Although it might seem so bittersweet when you ain nothing to eat and Sally may call him a phone for like the fifth time this week and all your bills are overdue, Like I know, we stop talking about himself there, let's hear that. It's like, yeah, that's the sting would seem a sweet you ain't got nothing to eat, Sally make call your phone for Like the fib I misinterpreted that maybe it is talking about himself. I mean, it sounds

like he's talking about himself. But I mean, even if it isn't, it's kind of like a universal feeling. I mean, it's it's like you're saying, everybody has that feeling. It could be he knows somebody and he's just drawing from somebody else's experience, but either way, it it totally makes sense with who he is being. Yea, it's got that kind of like backpack realness. I feel like backpackers are like a little more straight up about like he yo,

I'm working on a dairy quean. Well, yeah, I mean the backpack or indie aesthetic is kind of geared around just being more earnest and realistic with what your circumstances are as far as what you draw from to, you know, to inspire you to write your rhymes and stuff like that. So Lacoari has a similarly like, uh, how should I say this, like pensive vibe on this song. Well, let's listen to it first. This is always new by La

Craz professes couple of thousands and graduated in recession. Sadly may just want to check it, expressing us it's on a tree now, I'm in a session. The very thing I'm talking about, like this debate about whether or not we should go to school and try to get an education. It's like worth it. We never saw ourselves there, we go,

we leave thousands and debts. How it may is calling stressing out and then chasing music as like the way to finally make it out of this situation, even if not even necessarily that is, uh, how having the chain of something like you're the debt of getting your education. How that can prevent you from pursuing things that you would rather be pursuing, you know what I'm saying. So, I mean, whether that be music or maybe whatever, you know,

it's just it's it's a fucking burden. It's a it's another thing you have to do, you because it's like, I know, I know cats who who were trying to do their art but did the full Monty full ride through school, you know, and getting out. It's like they don't really have time to funk around. They gotta immediately start paying that ship back. So like pursuing something fun,

you know, it's not necessarily in the cards anymore. So we got another song that's kind of actually fun in celebratory in that the the protagonist uh is really excited about having paid off Sally May. And this is Sally

made Back by Do You Want the White Lady? Yeah, So I really love that Sally May And this music video it's depicted as the stern, older, suburban looking woman black nails, which oh fucking funny, because that's absolutely how I picture Sally May office before I got it in my mind, as like a sufficient enough adult to realize like Sally May wasn't like a living person to like, we know money. I was like, oh man, this fucking

pitch while he has like an ascot. So the next song that we got is World, World, Let's go a little Sally May reference that. I think it's energy we need to keep regarding our debts in the spirit of the de collective. So when he says he talks about, you know, making a lot of money off of shows, maybe then I could pick Sali mate, So I'll be dealing with some real like we're not. So that's the energy that we need for the same energy be we'll

keep for our landlords. I am so excited today to be talking to Astra Taylor, author, organizer, documentarian, and fellow former Athenian, which I think is actually how I came to know about your work. I was at the Nation offices in Manhattan in two thousand eighteen, uh meeting with their editorial board, and upon leaving, they said, oh, we have this book from this woman from Athens that we want to give you as a gift, and it was democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone.

I all of a said, needed when it's gone, which is not wrong, but UM, And so I took it home with me and I put it on my bookshelf. And it was a couple of months later that I was switching medications under the orders of my psychiatrists and had like a suicidal like break essentially, and I was sent to a hospital and they allowed me to bring a book, but they had to be softcover. So I sent my mom to the house. I was like, find me a softcover book to read while I'm in the

lunear bin, and she brought me. Democracy may not exist, but won't miss it when it's gone. And so I spent four days the only thing I could do was read your book, UM, and it was transformative. It was it was like my lifeline and otherwise cold and sterile world for like four days. UM. And that brings us to our topic of discussion today, because UM, I still

am in debt from being in the mental hospital. I owe the hospital a couple of thousand dollars and they called me and they send me mail and I am not alone. And that I realized, especially through reading the dec Collective's new book, I can't pay, won't pay. So we're here today to talk about debt. How did we get here with it? And what do we do now?

So if you could to start out with first, I have to respond to that amazing introduction though, because I think that was probably the most powerful introduction I've ever been given. And I just want to say out of the gate, the admiration is mutual. And one of the wonders of the Internet, which brings many terrible things into our lives, is that I've been able to watch Rise

rise and get to know her from afar uh. And you know how much you captured to me the ideal spirit of Athens, right, which is this town of creativity and music that it's you know and um and enjoy, but you know, it is also a community that you know, I always felt really needed to be politicized and should be more radical than I felt it was growing up there. Um. So the fact you're bringing those two straight rounds together

is really, um just moving and important to me. And your story about reading the book um again, the mental hospital and it leaving you in debt is amazing. So thank you to the nation editors my friends over there for for giving it to you. Okay, so we're in this debt based economy and just the way I look at it is very few things are coincidences and very few things are accidents. So it kind of tends, you know, makes me believe that this all has a reason for it.

So why why is our economy structure this way? Why are so many people in debt? I mean, it says it says so much, right, it ties into the bigger question about the debt based economy. We are in a situation where as individuals, we have to debt finance what should be our basic rights and our our basic entitlements. You know, we shouldn't ever experience. Indebtedness is a consequence of any sort of health crisis, whether it's a physical health crisis or a mental health crisis. I mean, most

countries don't have medical debt. It doesn't exist because they have universal healthcare. So and this is something that we take for granted as a feature of American life. You know, there's lots of research on this. You know, Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail often, you know, made a lot of noise about the fact that medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. It

is a leading driver of poverty in this country. It's what tips people over the edge, the fact that something happens you don't have control over, you know, and then suddenly you're buried in debt and your your life. The tenuous threads by what you're holding on fray and you know, things fall apart and it's just you know, a moral outrage, but it ties to these bigger dynamics. I mean, the thing about debt, once you start kind of cracking it open, is you can go all the way back like that

that precedes capitalism. That is a tool of domination and oppression proceeds capitalism as we know it. So if you go back to um, you know, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, what you had was people being driven into debt by the wealthy and then having to sell themselves into debt, slavery, debt, peonage. So I mean, it's like a very ancient violent form of economic control. UM. But it's really you know, it's

it's really essential to our our modern economy. And the insight I think from the debt collective is just that you know, we are as we move away from what limited, imperfect welfare state supports we had in the twentieth century, right, we're moving away from a welfare state to a debt fair state. So a world in which we have to take on the cost as individuals of uh provisioning for

ourselves through mechanisms of debt. What we should be entitled to, so education, healthcare, housing, I think, which should be a human right. UM, food, basic sustenance right. That's people are putting their um, you know, their their food and basic necessities on their credit cards around paiday loans, especially now in the age of COVID, and so it's like and

basically people are getting robbed twice. You're underpaid at your job if you have a job, and then you don't make enough money, so then you have to borrow and you end up paying interest in fees. And that's driving the incredible unethical concentration of wealth and power in this country. So it's a huge problem. And our principal and the same I'm speaking as the Debt Collective, as a founder of the Debt Collective, which is a union for debtors,

is that debtors have power. They're not utilizing that when you say that they can't pay, won't pay um that if we do that collectively, then actually what we can do just as a labor union withholds its labors can withhold their payments and exerts some countervailing force on the powers that be. And you know, we're at a point where we can't afford to leave power on the table. So US talked a little bit about what the debt collective is. Could you tell us where it came from?

I mean, it's one of these crazy things that only happens in a collaborative setting, right. So when one thing I say in the preface to the book, I wrote the preface and then the rest of the book is co authored, is that individually, not paying your loans isn't a debt strike. Right. So I defaulted on my student loans in two thousand and eight because I just didn't have enough money to pay them. And so what happens.

I get a phone call from the collector and they say, you know, hey, you haven't paid your loans and two days so guess what, now you have more. So now you have forty dollars and now your credits destroyed. And you know, that wasn't a dead strike. That was that was just you know, me, UM being unable to pay and then being penalized. But that UM kind of precipitated this political awakening. I mean I think I just thought, well, hey, like, why do I have so much debt from going to it,

you know college anyway? And I really bristled. I felt like, Okay, the fact I'm having to pay this for the next three years is gonna constrain me. It's gonna make me make choices I don't want to make. It's gonna control my life, you know. And um, it's gonna be this thing I'm always having to manage and worry about and like and just work basically just to like pay this inflating balloon of interests albatroz or something, you know. Um.

And so I think I was ready. It just took it took me finding others before I could, you know, begin on the path that led to the detllective. And so what happened is in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, I started collaborating with people. We realized that indebtedness was something that we're was really galvanizing. It was bringing people to the encampments, not just in New York

City where I was, but around the country. And one person whose name is Thomas goki Um said this thing, I vividly remember it because we were talking about, you know, kind of what campaigns or actions we'd like to see come out of the Octopills Street movement, and he said, unions, debtors need to make unions just like they're labor unions. And for me, it was like one of those moments when a light bulb went off in my head, just like in a cartoon, and I was like, whoa, you're right.

Like the model of unionization of like workers coming together in the workplace to argue, uh argue, but to fight for higher wages, benefits, more time off, right, that model should be applied to other arenas of the economy. And and it's true, like if we don't pay, they don't get their money. And that's that's what they're banking on. I mean, they've they've projected our future payments into their you know revenue uh forecasts, right like they they need that.

And it flipped. What it did was it cause a whole transformation of how I thought things. So suddenly my indebtedness, instead of it just being this burden and this albatross, I realized that it was actually some one else's profit that every payment I was making month after month after month, I was paying more than the original principle, the original

amount of world, because that's profit for someone else. So I started to see the way our collective debts are an asset of the ruling class, but then also an asset that we could leverage to demand change and demand the abolition of debts, but also the provision of public goods. In other words, give us that universal healthcare so we don't have medical debt, give us the universal education so we don't have to have student loans. And I think give us social housing because we shouldn't have to live

in a commodity. And you know, give people the um goods and services that they need to live dignified lives. I mean, you know, I'm I'm for mass decommodification of basically everything. Yeah, but I think I mean on the front of like where does it come from? I mean, I don't know. Growing up in Athens to you know, my parents were like always, you know, on the brink of economic catastrophe. Even though my dad was a professor.

They they declared bankruptcy when I was a teenager. My dad had tons and tons of student loans, you know that he was just paying off like far far into his career. There, my mom was just recounting how we used to go out to the mall on like Atlanta Highway. I guess it's college, Yeah, and eat at this one terrible restaurant. I never knew why we would go there at the end of the month, Like it was horrible, and she was like, because it was like the one

place that took this one credit card, you know. So I think there was this sense, like I think I just had this sense that, you know, something wasn't working with this system. It's like, you know, if you're somebody's gonna work a full time job, they should at least to be able to make it to the end of the month, you know. Um, so yeah, you're saying kind of like Occupy Wall Street was kind of going on

around like the inception of the debt collective. So I was wondering, Um, what do you think is like if you could pinpoint any particular public policy that's led us to this moment in the debt crisis, Like, I mean, obviously we know Corona is is, you know, doing what it's doing to the economy, But we were in a bubble before Corona happened, you know. It was looking kind of timid before that. But what what what condition led

us to to being in this is it? Is it merely just the people at the top want to grab power or is it more just individual systems that kind of add up to being this monster that it is where everyone's in debt. I mean, it's a complex array

of forces got us here. And I think you you know, in a really expansive sense, we have to look back and look at the history of capitalism, especially you know, what we would call the history of racial capitalism, and look at the way debt and credit have played out politically.

So if you go back to, you know, the sort of golden age of American capitalism in the mid twentieth century and look at how the middle class was formed, you know, it was we the white middle class was formed because there was easy access to government subsidized credit

in the form of government backed mortgages. Right that a program of giving a certain community, a racialized community, access to credit on fair terms is what sort of built that the sort of cliche of the American dream for a certain set of people, and it was very exclusionary.

So I think something like or of betterly secured mortgages in that period went to white patriarchal you know last on last week's episode, and so access to credit, you know, has um access to credit, then the inverse, which is denial of predator redlining or or predatory lending, you know, have created this unequal, the unequal, racialized economy that we

live in today. And so I think it's important to put that twentieth century history like sort of as the foundation, even though we could go further back, right, we can go, we can go back to the abolition of slavery and the fact that you know, formerly slave people, then the dominant economic relationship with sharecropping, pen and farming, right and and in debt there as a form of of suppression

of the drive for you know, true egalitarian democracy. So but in the seventies, something definitely happened, you know, and scholars talk about neoliberalism, we talk about financialization, but basically, you know, what happened was the ruling class went on a war with the welfare state, you know, and wages, wages were suppressed. And what happened is we cover that up by giving people access to credit. You know, That's that's when people started having credit cards. Um, that's when

tuition became more common at public universities. People started you know, taking on debt to go to college. And so, you know, there was like an economic shift that's not just one policy, but it was kind of reorganization of the economy that diminished the state, that um short of corporate power, that covered up inequities with credit. And now we're you know, in a situation where that system is kind of yeah,

well that system is dominant. But then with COVID, it's like, you know, incredibly disastrous because you know, when people can't when people don't have paychecks, when they don't have when they're unemployment, benefits dry up, like you're just gonna have mass delinquency, mass default, and you know, debt and despair as a consequence. And it's like, so we are living in a moment of record consumer debt. I mean it's something like fourteen trillion dollars and that's a symptom of

just the mal distribution of wealth in this country. It's like, so you have people who just dream of literally like we the average you know, American now just dreams of having zero dollars, Like, oh my god, if I could just have zero and not negative, that would be awesome. And meanwhile, you have you know, these billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who's really just like, you know what, I dream of a trillion dollars and he's almost sucking there, Like he's

almost there. But I think that the depth of this model of debt financing UM is, you know, it sort of knows no bounds. I mean, one thing we talk a lot about in the book and are working at more as as the decllective is the fact that you know, people go into debt for their own incarceration, right, and that connects with this larger moment where people are discussing because an abolition and you know, our criminal injustice system

or whatever we want to call it. But you know, the fact is people have to take on debt to pay cash bail. So often you know, it's not cash bail, it's credit fail. So people's family members and loved ones end up um going into debt to get people out of people they love, out of cages. The average bail debt in California's fifty dollars, you know, and often you have to have that even if you're found not guilty and you're the charges are UM, you know, charges are dismissed,

people have to pay for probation. I mean, so it's this insidious model that's in its tendrils are in you know, all aspects of our life, and it is ultimately is a way of it's a form of just allowing people

who are already rich to extract more. And that's the thing we're trying to We're trying to like get people to see the economy in this way as to de naturalize debt and ask, you know, why it's so omnipresent and whose interests it serves Because we're told this lie that we take it on ourselves, and we take that risk on so we can better ourselves and better a future. And I think we want to say no, it's it's imposed on us, and it's a form of control, and

it's a form of um enriched. It's it's a means of enriching those who are already in a position, um you know, already who already have the upper hand. Yeah, So talk to us if you get a little bit about the impacts of debt or organizing to date and some of what you hope it can achieve. Pretty rearly interested in like y'all have scored some some wins already and then you know a few years since this got

off the ground. Yeah, So the idea of this idea of the decollective and as as a union, um, you know, we tried to see if that concept would actually take off. So we launched what we call sort of our pilot Debtors Union in two thousand fifteen, and basically we made contact with students who had gone to one of the big for profit college chains, so people probably know like University of Phoenix and I T. T. Tech. It was one of those companies. It was called Corinthian Colleges. They've

been totally like lied to, defrauded. So they went to these vocational programs and came out of them with like seventy thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars hundred fifty thousand dollars of debt, and you know, and their resumes were laughed at um and the abuses of these companies was

well documented. The thing. The thing is that for profit colleges on the back end, like if you have a student loan, whether it's from University of Phoenix or Harvard, it's the same financial it's the same financial structure leading straight to the Department of Education, right, so you're you know, one degree might be fancy and get you access, and one degree might be kind of risible, but the the money, the system that matters is all the same and and

you know, so that's ultimately what we're targeting. But basically, we organized the first ever student debt strike. It began

with only fifteen people. We also developed the legal strategy um that has so far been put to use by we just got numbers three hundred and sixty thousand people because these for profit colleges are huge, and you know, we ended up being the first group to ever win debt relief from the federal government, from the Department of Education first under Obama, and we've been fighting Betsy Divas ever since and we've won well over a billion dollars.

That's with a b billion dollars to date. And then in doing that we devised this legal What we realized in our research was actually the Department of Education has the ability Congress already vested The Congress already vested the Department of Education with the power to erase every penny of student debt. And yes they can do it. There's literally like a destroy button in the form of education.

We wrote like this one page letter that if the Department, if the Secretary of Education would just sign it, all of our federal student loans would be obliterated. Um, and uh, you know, then we could start trying to figure out how to actually solve our problems. But what's amazing is that this theory that it was admittedly pretty fringe, because of course that hasn't been done before a few years ago.

When we started pushing it. A couple of weeks ago, um in the bizarreness of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer from New York. So Chuck Schumer, for I mean, is not a liberal guy, he's a bad man. But they announced a Senate resolution basically saying, uh, yeah, use this legal argument and erase fifty dollars per borer in

the country. And so they you know, it was quite the surreal moment where these ideas that fundamentally came from the Debt Collective, which is this group born of Occupy Wall Street, suddenly Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren are there saying exactly what we've been saying for the last four years and and acknowledging and acknowledging they have we have the power to do this, and this will cost nothing.

So there's no you know, because what it does if you just cancel student debt, you're not if there's no expenditure, right, they don't need to do any cost analysis. What it does. That means all that money that people would be otherwise paying to their loan servicer, they can help pay their rent, they could buy some music, they could eat well. Right, that money would be in the economy. So it would

be a huge economic stimulus. That's like the capitalist argument for it, because all that money could go to things people actually need and you know, quote unquote get the economy moving again instead of sending it back to the federal government via these like predatory collectors and mediators. Wouldn't also be good for people's mental health if not, Like the majority of the population was walking around stressed out.

People are like open the economy the supicide, right, it's going there's all these deaths of despair, Like you just cancel all the debt. I mean, I it's I mean, I just heard of a friend's dad like last week, and he killed himself because he was so indebted, and then with COVID he was isolated and he couldn't see a way out right. Um and then he's so indebted that you have these creditors basically um like buying for a piece of whatever, like limited little estate he had,

right like whatever things he had after his death. So one statistic in the book is the average American dies with sixty dollars of debt and um and I think you're totally right that it's a it's a mental health crisis. I mean, it's something that like you feel the anxiety in your body and in your mind right when you are worried about how you're going to pay your loans or whether or not you're going to be evicted. I mean, forty million people are at risk of eviction now in

the rent even with the moratorium. What they know is that they're just gonna be a massive rent bill at the end of this and um and so it has total uh psychological effects and those are not incidental. So this is one thing that's really important, the fact that

this there is a disciplinary function of debt. So and and people say this, you know really clearly, so Alan Greenspan, right, the um uh, the economist you know it said, you know, right, if you have if you have people who hold mortgages, you're not going to have a country that's like going on stripe. You're not going to have a populace that

is going to be, you know, demanding more. You're going to have people who are right, they can't come to the demonstration because they've got to be at work, because they're not to get kicked out of they have so much. I mean, if you're a renter, you get kicked out of your house, it's bad. But if you have someone who and you've been paying your mortgage for fifteen years, you don't want to lose all of that you know, wealth that you imagine that you've you've invested in there,

right you know. Um, and so this is so you know that was well appreciated, was that a nation of mortgage holders would be what is the word I'm looking for, more subdued, right, um? And and more docile. And then with student loans, this history is really clear. I mean, basically, Ronald Reagan was governor of California. Um. You know, the University of California system was the crown jewel of the country, was public, it was free and then what happened while

there was there was student arrested Berkeley. Famously, there was also at this at the junior college system, uh, the formation of basically black radicalism, I mean, the Black Panther Party emerged at Merrick College and these free public colleges, and Reagan was like, yeah, no, he really truly was like, this is not you know, this is not a conspiracy theory.

He basically was like, hell no, and we're going to kick those bumps off campus and when they pay for it, they're not gonna um, they're not going to engage in this kind of behavior. And so there was a you know, Neil Liiberal economists, Um, we're like, okay, this is how you control that is that you impose tuition and debt and then you get you know, and then your college students stop being rebels. And so it's always I mean, it is it is a tool of of of control.

And you know, in the psychological effect of that of like make a population that feels like they're constantly on the brank of economic collapses, like to some people, that's a benefit, you know, And and the challenge for organizing debtors then is that what you first have to do is say, Okay, I know this makes you like, I know you can't can't face that bill. I know that it makes you sick to open that envelope because it's scary.

And I know that you've been indoctrinated into this world view that tells you that it's your fault and that if you had done something better or been a better person, you wouldn't be in debt. Hey, you'd be a millionaire. But you know, let go of that shame and stigma and realize you are not alone, which is our slogan,

and and come together. So one thing I think we offer as a as a union, as an as an organization is not just the possibility that your debts will be erased, but also that you can erase that shame, right, and that that's also a huge value. He started to talk a little bit about the challenges of debtors organizing and so I'm really curious how it differs from other

forms of organizing. In the book, you will talk about how like we're all spread out across geography and all different walks of life, and look at as an asset being able to connect with folks who have shared experience even though they might be different than in either other ways.

I wonder if that might also make it harder even that in Athens, like you know, last week there was a video of a young man getting painted by the cops, and now we're all on the street together, you know, a couple of days later, because it's like geographically bound, like we all live in this place together, we're all

going to stand up for changes in this place. So I'm just curious, like what the two sides of the coin are with the sort of distributed nature of the demographic of debtors, I guess my my thought in response to that, though, is that even to how people mobilize locally with that sense of consciousness, you still have to do you stop to do work. It's not spontaneous, right, It's not like neighbors. Neighbors don't just naturally like spontaneously

or naturally rise up or have solidarity. Like that's something to me as someone who used to live in Athens. You hearing you say that, I'm like, well, that means that you've done the work and other people have done the work of organizing to even to get people in Athens to see themselves as a political community. That should

respond to something like that, right um. Uh. And so you know organizing regionally is also it also takes effort um and you have to form those bonds and that consciousness um and and uh and so in that sense, you know, it's not that different to organize people at a distance, UM, because you know, we're we're what we're

doing is we're exposing a commonality. Right, It's like, Okay, actually, you know at the end of the month, you're all stressing out over making this payment, and that's something that that that that brings you together, and UM can unite you. So you know, I think for people on the left or people who want to engage in activism, like the building the bonds of solidarity is just it's always really hard, right UM. And I guess for me, like one of my naive questions, so I was like, why is it

harder to divide us than unite us? Why? Why? Um? And And then I think I'm also just interested in like, well, what new forms of uniting can we invent, like to approach it as like a creative question or problem, like what what other ways can we identify? What ways can we identify that that that UM bring these unlikely alliances uh into being, and I think that, you know, I think we have to not universalized too much about indebtedness.

Like that's why it's important to keep that lens that that reveals, uh, the way that racism has shaped indebtedness. So one of our phrases at the beginning was that is the tie that binds, but it doesn't bind everybody equally, right, Like that is common, but it's not an equalizer. It amplifies inequalities in lots of ways, is um Nevertheless, you know, for example, with our for profit college union, you know, it was a really it was a really diverse group.

I mean there were people who lived in rural areas, and there were urban youth, and there were um, you know, middle aged grandmas who had kind of gone back to college after the economic crisis in two thousand and eight, and then there were young people just starting their lives out. And you know, they were black, they were white, a lot of them were first generation, a lot of single mothers.

But you know, I think when you when you do organize with a material analysis and you follow those chains of debt or you know, look to where people are being exploited in the workplace, you will kind of you will end up with a diverse coalition, right because you know, that's that's the real that's who's being exploited in this world and taken advantage of. Um. Yeah, there are there are real There are definitely colleges in debt or organizing and there you know, and I'm not sure they're not

that different than organizing. UM in general, I think we have. I think the thing about that or organizing is just that it's it's a new framework, right, Like we're customs of thinking, Yeah, we're a customed to thinking okay, organized electorally organized at the workplace, get out and vote or

join a union. Yeah, and this is like, okay, hey, here's this whole new set of not just of corporate targets and government targets, because there's the sense of like you could organize against the bail bond's company or the paida lender or the bank or the government apparatus that enables their behavior or could potentially regulate them or implement

a policy that could put them out of business. Um. But it's but it's it's so I think that's I think right now we're still in the proselytizing phase of like, hey, this is how the economy is organized. It's organized to put you in debt. So we should then use this as an opportunity to organize ourselves in a new way to transform it. M absolutely. I was also curious in terms of challenges UM. In my lifetime, at least I've

seen movements emerge at if acute moments of injustice. The murders of like of Michael Brown or George Floyd has some personally impactful examples. I wonder if you see a potential matchstick moment for debtors organizing the way that we've seen previous UH moments of a justice spark these huge movements UM around a certain kind of organizing or in a certain UM frame or areas. Such a good question. I mean, I I think sometimes those moments can be made.

I mean, this is a whole theory of organizing UM. You know. I don't know if you followed like the momentum model which has influenced the UM groups like Sunrise for example, but their whole thing is that you can generate those galvanizing moments of crisis UM instead of kind of waiting for one UM. So my my impulse is

you know, debt or organizing. Um. You know, I think one of the things about debt, I mean it's a little bit like the wage, right, it's kind of part of part of the ideology of capitalism is, oh, that's private, right. You don't talk about that. You don't you don't go around talking about what you're paid, you don't go around talking about what what you owe. And so it's kind of insidious in that way. It's a little invisible. Um. So it challenges my imagination to think, like what would

be the big spark. But on the other hand, you know, I think with COVID, our economy is like going off

the rails. I mean, once again, fort allion people in this country are going to be an imminent threat of eviction and homelessness and have these massive back rents do and you know, something like that can't spark and like, you know, a movement about this, then I don't know, I don't know what it would take, um, but it feels like we might be heading to heading into a different um like just different terrain because of the crisis that we're in right now. Um. And that's why I

think we're having moment. It's their dog and their Mailman. Everyone needs to read Can't Pay. Well, that's I'm serious, it's really good book. But and then we'll have the frame work I which to understand the moment we're going through, and the moment itself will be the match thing. Well, I think that's I mean, that's sort of you know, I guess I'm like, I don't want to be too prophetic or optimistic, but I think that is the that's

the wage that we're trying to make. What you know is that we know that tens of millions of people are going to be in the can't pay scenario and already are like that's where we are in this moment.

And so you know, if we can rise to the occasion as the debt collective and his organizers and turn that can't pay moment into a won't pay moment, right because you shouldn't have to pay anyway, Like these debts are immoral because their their debts related to your basic survival and you know, things you should be entitled to as a human being, then yes, that could be our match stick. Right. So it's you know, I think I'm sorry, no, no,

but I think that's right. I mean that you know, we want the proposition we're making is like, you know, skip the shame, skip the self reproach, and like let's get angry and get organized and indignant about this. In a way, I think it might. I think COVID kind of might help out with that because one of the things that I worry about sometimes is with everyone's lives kind of with everyone's lives being you know, built around hustle and bustle, and everyone has to grind and grind that.

I feel that sometimes when things get so outrageous that that can some sometimes dampen people's want to fight. You know, you were talking about how being in debt can be a form of keeping the population subdued. Like I feel like, just using Trump as an example, if we were to wake up one morning and see that Trump did something like completely completely outrageous, like more outrageous than the normal, that most people would be mad on their phone in

the morning and then have to go to work. And I feel like COVID, now the economy now don't have shipped to do. So It's like, let's like, how how would the would the George Floyd protests and the protests that have followed since, would that have been as massive and widespread. If forty million people didn't get lose their job before him, well, what do you think have that to tie them down? I'm I don't think so personally.

I think I think it kind of goes hand in him. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's what I think. That's right. I think there was something about people living in a different time scale because of the pandemic that enabled a deeper reflection for some people who might otherwise have just ignored it or um like moved on more quickly. Uh. And so I think I do think pandemic time influenced people's responses. I think the thing for me is that, you know, I just want people to be have a

better analysis of power. It's like, how where is the power? What power do we have, what leverage do we have? And so that's it's like, because I actually think there are lots of people who are pretty awake and who care about things in a disgusted by injustice. I think what we don't have in this country are you know, solid organizations that are geared towards like um class conflict on the side of the working class, right, like unions are really really incapacitated by the legal regime we're in.

I mean, if you go back to the beginning of this country, imported from British common law, is basically this idea like workers organizing was a conspiracy, it was illegal, But the legal regime has always been set up to encourage you know, investors and bosses to collaborate, right, Like what is an LLC but just basically a legal mechanism so that like you know, people can collaborate and have

a business and have limited liability. Right. So from the very beginning of this country, it's like there has been uh an assault on people's capacities to collaborate and have some literarity and and organize um organizing their interests. So I guess that's where you know, I think if we need to make an intervention, it's like, okay, we all we you know, a lot of people care enough of us care about what's going on in the world that if we were just organized, we could change things together, right,

bearing together in a strategic way. That actually is like where is the power, you know, where can we stop the flows of capital, Where can we interrupt exploitation? Where do we have political leverage? Which is why it's so important for people like Maria and others to be running for office and you and um and having skin in that game. But I think, you know, it's really for me the power analysis that we need to be developing and like building the organizational and institutional might to get

in the way of business as usual. Um, you know. And and protests are amazing and I moved by them, and I've been at my share of them in my life, but like I want, I want different forms of institutional power. Yeah, for sure, I wouldn't be respectful for your if your time first stance. We're getting in towards three thirty, I don't know if you've got to run a Should we get to the last question? I'm really curious for the

second to last question. Then second to last question, I do want to say one thing about the racial justice then really quick is you know it's interesting that the phrase we always use as reckoning, that we're having a reckoning around racial justice, now that that word actually means

it's actually a reference to debt. Right, it's a settling of accounts, it's a calculation, and so it's kind of you know, for me, as someone involved in debt or organizing, it's interesting that our moral language is steeped in indebtedness and the payback of debts. Right, So one thing the debt collective is trying to do, and what we're trying to do with campaign Won't Pay, is like challenge the morality of debts. Right, we don't we don't, uh, we don't always have to pay. In fact, the rich walk

away from their debts all the time. I mean, look at the revelations about Trump. Right, we knew Trump had like six or seven bankruptcies behind him, but you know he's like he's like four million dollars in debt or something like that, and he's been able to use it to just get richer and get more powerful. Um. But I think you know the the the flip side of that, though, is like, well, what debts do we want to pay?

Like we don't want to pay these student loans, we don't want to pay these medical bills, but we want to pay reparations. We want you know, to like we want to pay the climate debt that you know, we as this rich, industrialized question country oh for you know, burning up more than our fair share of carbon and to help pay back debt so we can build a new green economy. So I think that the yeah, the

language of reckoning in this moment is interesting. Um, you know in this question of like okay, yeah, in a reckoning like what like we need receipts. You know, it's not just if the perspective that's required that's really interesting. You know as a linguist, that's just like, oh my gosh, you know, there's like a linguistic and etymological link between like this moment we're having and the language we are

using about it. But we can we could do a whole interview, just like Love for Etymology, because they like because where words come from, like the meaning, like the reckoning. It's like that meaning is even if you don't know it consciously, it suffuses it. Like that's part of why we're going to that word. Um, I love words were just so good and you're good at words. Thank you. I really appreciated that. I really if you if you were rhyming, it would probably make some ill verses. My god,

that episode we would be. So that's not even fair to say that because now you might not do it. It's not every episode. Since it's about hip hop and politics. We wrap in the intro and I the show, and so for many weeks, a lot of times we freeze out, but for many weeks we like right versus about the topic. So I this weekend, I'm gonna sit down, let's see what I got for that, and then I'll have to

have another dance party. I had one question about scaling that strikes to like various institutions from a local governmental perspective. I was really intrigued by the chapter about governments refusing their debt and wondered if you could speak to that a little bit, just give me a little piece of ice about how to bring this to bear in my local legislation. So, um, where do we start? I think one one thing? Okay to begin, Well, you see hear a lot about debt from the right wing, and the

argument from the right wing was the national deficit. We as a country are so in debt, and we're just like a household. When a household is in debt, we need to like tighten our belt. We need to cut our spending right and uh, and so therefore we're going to have to cut some security and cut funding education and cut you know, everything except the military, accept the police. So that is as we've seen post COVID fundamentally wrong.

I mean, what did the federal government do. They just came up with trillions and trillions of dollars for corporations overnight without any discussion. So at the federal government level, that's wrong. At the state level and the municipal level, governments aren't able to just print money in the same way the Feds are. Right, So there are real vegetary constraints, But we have a dynamic where um, the rich people win.

Why because we don't tax wealthy residents, right, States and local governments don't tax rich residents enough, don't tax corporations. Um end up imposing regressive taxes right sales tax or whatever else. And then what do we do. We issue bonds, which is a basically borrowing from rich residents. So you say like, hey, rich people are not going to tax you, but we'll borrow your money and we'll pay you interest and um and in Wall Street will will get a

cut for brokering the deal. And so what we have today is situations where you know, people communities have to issue bonds for schools, for roads. But also like there was a big paper recently about police brutality bonds. So essentially city governments issuing bonds, borrowing millions of dollars um so that they can pay when the cops kill people.

In other words, residents are paying, yeah, for killer cops, but the investors in those bonds and a k a. The rich residents get their dividends in Wall Street gets a fee off of these, you know, bonds covering police brutality. So I think that's that that is a vivid example of just how messed up the system is. So um so one thing, you know, I think it's it's these deals are really commonplace, and so we are organizing. We have a Hub Debt Collective Pennsylvania that's sort of centered

in Philly. I'm engaging in in campaigns that are focused on renegotiating these municipal debt deals. Right. So, you know, school systems lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year because they're paying interests on these bonds, and Wall Streets, you know, getting a cut, And that's money that I can go to patching the roof, or hiring more teachers, or giving the students the computers they need to learn remotely. Right, So I think I think there are some potential really

interesting campaigns of municipal debt resistance. One dream we've had is, well, what if multiple cities went on strikes? My dream too, That's what I was thinking about, like finding other cities that are that are done bonds with a certain you know, and maybe you've all done bonds with Goldman Sacks and then there's like a five city municipal strike against Goldman Sacks.

I think that there is another thing that cities and states could do that would be really cool, which is how do you protect your citizens from predatory lenders and debt collectors. UM, Well, there's something called eminent domain. Right. Eminent domain is where the government right see the hotels, se seize the debts that people owe because you're you know those those sheets of all of the money. That's so that's an asset. That's property that could be seized

by eminent domain. And E raced UM and we've been working working and we've been working with so this. We have been working with UM, any leading economist on this. And there's a wonderful assemblyman in New York named ron King him from Queen's New York Assembly. When we were we ron Kim on this idea. UM and so, I mean there's so many things. This is this is the thing. We have lots of rights on the books that aren't respected.

I mean that's the story of America, right, It's like you know, so I think one thing is people need to get organized just to have the rights they have on the books enacted. Like that's that's that's true. And there's there are consumer protections, um and and things that that we can mobilize and organize around. But then there's so much that, uh, there's so much that could be done if people were actually brave enough to use the

state power at their disposal. Right, I mean this is why we have built this whole movement pointing out the fact the Department of Education has the power to cancel all student debt, Like, should Democrats control the Department of Education next year? Right, We're not going to let them say, oh, sorry, Mitch McConnell, won't let us do it. Right, the Republicans are obstructing us. We're gonna say no, you actually unilaterally have the power, and you're just cowards or worse than that,

you like to see people suffer. Right, So I think this question of what what power do people have? What rights do people have that they can you know, fight to enact. What power do people have that they should use? And then how can we push the envelope and imagine using some of these things like eminent domain or you know the power of municipal finance to renegotiate the terms and start democratizing the economy. Is like where our movements need to go next, because I think, you know, victors

like that are inspiring to people. You know, that's the thing, um, and it would terrify Wall Street, which would also be fun, super fun my favor. Well, Yo, this was amazing. I feel like we need to talk for hours. This is set out, but we probably you know what, will probably have to ask you to come back on for something else. I'm sure I would love that. But we get to hang out in person one day, so I would really like that when hanging on in person happens again, it

will happen, I think it's going to happen. But I'm so honored to be on here, and I feel like I'm talking to like an old friend. So really I feel the same. Where can we uh? Where can people find you? All? Right? So, well, first of all, so what do we do? I've got hospital bills. You got bills, Yes, I got bills, hospital bills. So everybody listening, we all got bills. What do we do now? W W you debt collective dot org, sign up, join the union. If you don't have money to pay your dues, that's fine,

you know. I think it's important that people. I think it's important people pages because we don't want social movements that are funded by philanthropy, and we don't want social movements that are funded by people who are ultimately invested in maintaining the status quo. That's why it is important

that we UH own our organizations. But there are dispute tools that you can use for free UH to dispute any sort of wage, wage garnishment, so security garnishment, tax garnishment you might be suffering if you're in default, to dispute any debt in collections UH and join especially the student loan that is union, because we want to force the hand of the government in the year ahead and make them abolish all one point seven trillion dollars of

student loans. And as someone who has been working on this issue for the last eight years, I can tell you we're closer than we'd ever thought we'd be. So let's push it over the edge and make the Republican nightmare come true. Because what they always tweet is what you raise? Student loans? What's next? Credit cards? Auto loans? Yes, yes, yes, like follow that line all the way through, buddy, that's where we're going forever. That's how it should be. Bring

it back, that's how it should be. Social housing. You should be able to live in a home and not in a commodity. Your life will be better. But that's where they find us. On the internet, where you find everything in these days. At debt strike on Twitter. Oh yeah, at strike, debt on Twitter, strike on Twitter? Got it? Yeah, thank you so much? You really dope talking in here. I feel like reparations. Let's get a beat. You waiting

on reparations? Do and I fighting for collective liberation. Yet we're taking on the titans by tell them the big bankers we're making any payments for our hospitalizations or our cars and work credit card. Tell them they should thank us for every dollar they're making up the way the ball us different load, can't bay, won't BA have to tell them? Louis No from Seattle to Nevada. Louis worked a lout b and privatization and the race of that.

We shouldn't oh straight up abolish it. Give us three comments in joblessness to give free healthcare to all of us. We can't pay till we won't pay. You not get that straight, because together we owned the whole bag. Put the lean on my whip. I'm afraid when a part at eight team wanted kicks put it straight in the car started racking the bill. Still, it was confusing to see stuck in my dad up to my neck like I'm through in the sea. Couldn't think long term what

the future could be. No, I can't unlearn the fucking users agree, I gotta pay that the hope of my fortune. Don't want to say jack with all the old make me feel like I'm stuck in a straight jack. But then told the state tax the rent wise stays that will I survive? I bet if I will. I wish that I didn't once I see that medical bill, don't jesus damn reph. Hey, my name's dope knife Franca, and we are waiting on reparations. Hurry the fuck see you

guys next week. Waiting on reparations is a production of I heart Radio. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.