Episode description

Western narratives LOVE the “hero,” but it’s much more punk to be in touch with the reality of the many people who feel they are losing out.

In this day and age, that means people who have burdensome debt. 13% of Americans expect to be in debt the rest of their lives, and most people with student loans feel confident they will never go away. This experience is in stark contrast to the methodology of leverage that wealthy individuals and well-capitalized organizations employ, using debt as cheap capital and not a life sentence.

In this episode we re-imagine debt from the people’s point of view, offering three ways of dealing with debt: the “drop out and avoid,” the nihilistic “catch me if you can,” and the Debt Collective’s activist “tear it down collectively” approaches.

In this episode, you’ll learn the difference between cancellation and forgiveness and how it plays into larger movements for social justice, as well as options for debt cancellation, like how Iceland responded to the 2008 crisis in a citizen-centered, people’s bailout.

The Ladies Who Crunch started this episode reading The Debt Collective’s book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay as a jumping off point for reimagining the concept of indebtedness as immoral, and one that should be time-bound, with a guarantee of an end, and we’re indebted to their thought leadership and labor.

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at bottomlinestopdollars@gmail.com.