S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “outside” pressure

No single executive order by President Biden may be as consequential as the one he signed in August, that may soon lead to forty million people having all of their student debt wiped away. But most of the stories chronicling the path to mainstream acceptance of student debt cancellation leave out the first five years the organizers were largely ridiculed and ignored... until they launched the nation’s first student debt strike, and ended up at a bargaining table with the Secretary of Education. 

In this episode, we’ll hear about the campaign’s beginning at Occupy Wall Street (16:01) and its “scouting” phases (13:20); how they used crowdfunded medical, bail and student debt cancellation as an outreach tactic ( 13:42); “dropping a bomb” in a red box on Obama Administration officials (29:00); how they kept up outside pressure even when they were at the bargaining table (32:12); how their basebuilding and casework influenced the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries (36:13); focusing on Black women borrowers (43:25) and building a broader coalition to keep the pressure on (43:37). 

You can watch some of the Debt Collective's actions, referenced in the episode, on their website.

Ann Bowers is a former Corinthian Colleges Inc student and organizer with the Debt Collective. 

Eleni Schirmer is a writer, educator and organizer. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and Boston Review, and elsewhere. She currently works as a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and organizes with The Debt Collective. 

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: In this episode, we’re going to go behind the scenes of the fight to cancel student debt, which is very much not over. Since Joe Biden’s announcement in August that twenty million of us, including me, may have all of our student debt canceled, and millions more could have some debt erased, multiple federal courts have weighed in, and now the president claims he has to wait for the Supreme Court to make a decision before moving forward – even though his administration had already discharged billions of student debt before this particular executive order. We’ll dive into the back story to 2022, which goes all the way back to 2011, about the lead up to the nation’s first student debt strike, how those strikers won a seat at the bargaining table with the Obama Administration, and how they used “debtors’ assemblies” and direct actions to inspire tens of thousands of former students to shake off their shame, and believe that together, their debts could make them powerful. 

We’re going to tell the story of the fight before this student debt campaign launched publicly, and then the seven years since then, because a lot of campaigns don’t move logically from Step 1, brainstorming a demand, or reacting to what our opponents just did, to Step 2, power mapping, to Step 3, launching a campaign, to Step 4, winning our demands. Sometimes we go through scouting phases, where we’re checking out if there’s an appetite from our base, or a phase that’s focused on testing our opponents, checking out our power map in real time, before deciding if we have leverage to launch a full-on campaign. Sometimes we have to do casework, to find people really impacted by the problem, who are willing to organize to get some relief, rather than wait for the problem to fix itself. And sometimes our campaigns have to pivot, or go into hibernation, when the political terrain shifts. 

And because we’re going to tell more of that backstory, and weave in the voices of two different Debt Collective organizers, this episode is going to be very different than our others this season. You’re going to hear more from me, as a narrator. You’ll also hear from Eleni Schirmer, who is a writer, educator and Debt Collective organizer, and works as a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and from Ann Bowers, who is a Debt Collective organizer and former student of Corinthian Colleges. 

And this episode is different in another way, in that it’s not just about one campaign, but is an example of multiple campaign arcs cresting over many years, each with specific campaign demands, all advancing a movement goal. A movement goal, which in this case is, cancel ALL debt, is sometimes also referred to as a symbolic or narrative demand. And sometimes our narrower, campaign demands, which are sometimes referred to in organizer jargon as instrumental demands, emerge from our attempts to build collective actions against much larger forces.  

So, how do you build a campaign against a concept, like debt? An idea that many of us on the left aren’t even aware of as a distinct concept, and that is so pervasive, it just feels like part of the wallpaper of our lives. It’s there in the background, but most people don’t notice or question it. 

Probably the best intervention I’ve seen against an idea, was Occupy Wall Street. Occupy shined a spotlight on another kind of wallpaper, the idea of winner take all capitalism that has been funneling more and more of the wealth we create to the people who already have the most, that has been underway since the 1970s. In the fall of 2011, at hundreds of encampments around the country, thousands of people who had never been to a study group, had never been part of a direct action, were suddenly trying to figure out in real time how to reverse that trend and practice democracy. It was messy, and it was captivating, and the story that got told later was that it “failed”, but the huge changes we’ve seen on the popular understanding and political will around student debt is just one example of the undeniable ripples it created. 

Think about it. There are so many pillars holding up the idea that it’s ok for the top 1% to keep amassing wealth at our expense. There’s the idea that housing should always be available only to the people who can pay the most for it. Another is, that in order to get a good job, or even to get good medical care if we get injured, we should have to go into debt. That even though it’s not our fault when we get sick, and even though the best paying jobs are out of reach if you can’t afford a degree, it’s still a personal failure if you end up with debts you can’t pay. 

It’s hard to wage a campaign against an idea. And yet, the Debt Collective, in eleven short years, has quietly transformed how we think about debt, without most of us even noticing. 

Right after the original Occupy Wall Street encampment was dismantled, a small group of visionaries, who called themselves Strike Debt, and three years later would rebrand as the Debt Collective, looked at the power map of global capitalism, and realized that a less visible weapon the biggest companies used to keep the rest of us weak, was debt. Big countries, giant companies, the 1%, had all been using credit rating agencies, and unmanageable debt loads, to keep the rest of us in check, constantly struggling to pay off debts, rather than build up our own assets. Creditors using debt as a weapon are often our invisible opponents, hiding behind right-wing figures openly campaigning against public education or healthcare for all. 

Years before she got involved with the Debt Collective, Eleni Schirmer ran into this dynamic as a graduate student labor organizer in Wisconsin. 

Eleni Schirmer: It was with the Teaching Assistants Association, which is the nation's oldest graduate worker union. And I was active in that union and one of the co-presidents. Act 10 was passed in 2011, and I think I was the  co-president of the union in 2013 and 2014, dealing with the immediate aftermath of the public sector bargaining rights onslaught that Wisconsin had suffered in 2011.

AWG: And for those who are listening who don't know. But Act 10 was supposed to be the Death knell of public sector worker unions in Wisconsin, and some of them did end up losing nearly 75% of their dues-paying members.

And then eventually the Supreme Court made it national, with the Janus decision.  And so then you're an organizer in those times, and you're still on campus organizing ten years later at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is when you get connected with the Debt Collective. Can you say more about that context, where you began connecting the assault on education with an underlying issue around debt?

ES: At this point I was really on the tail end of my graduate studies and was kind of just that kind of annoying organizer that's like trying to finish their graduate work and says no to all the union asks.

But I was concerned with the furloughs and the layoffs that people, not so much graduate workers, but the university staff, the dining hall employees at the campus, the secretaries, all those kind of  urloughs and layoffs that were being administered. And I was troubled when I learned that millions at the same time that the lowest played workers on campus were being told let go, and students were still paying full price for tuition and housing that they weren't able to, you know, college had been reduced to a series of tabs on a browser for them, and they were still being charged full price.

That that part of the context of all of that was cause of  the debt obligations that the university had to its creditors. And this just was a huge, sort of eye opening moment for me. And I began to sort of do some research and put some things together. And me and especially me and my colleague, Jason Wasniak, my comrade at the Debt Collective, started leading a bunch of public education workshops with the people also around Labor Notes Rich Levy, Joanna Gonzalez, Dana Morrison To, to sort of make this a more public, We did basically a bunch of political education in these kind of like forums and workshops and series that were all zoom with people from across the country to sort of draw out this, this what we call debt as the heartbeat of austerity from households to institutions.

And everything in between.

And, and frankly like countries actually we're watching the global south literally go underwater and be still like paying premium interest payments for these loans that they owe that IMF. 

AWG: That's an incredible. Real world example of people at university being laid off, maybe having benefits, wages cut.

And there's a secret opponent sort of in the background here. Exactly. Like pressing like a vice. Exactly. We think, oh, the board of trustees must be to blame. And they're responding to pressure from this secret, these creditors in the background. 

ES: Exactly. Exactly. And in the context of Wisconsin, like Scott , Walker had been so vilified by the liberals and with reason.

I mean, the only thing he hated more than public unions was public education. And the only thing he hated more than public education was public higher education. He was rightly a villain of this story of the austerity, but it really sort of clicked into place for me when I read a, a rating methodology for, for higher ed institutions, the Moodys, which is a private.

Credit rating company that to borrow money, any institution, any city, any government, any person has to get rated there, have to have a credit score. And Moody's does this and they use this methodology. And when I read the methodology and the part of the methodology that, that that connects this, the labor unions on a campus with the credit score, the stronger the labor, the organized labor is on a campus, the weaker the credit score the stronger the tenure protections, the weaker credit score.

It all kind of shifted for me. And not that Scott Walker isn't to be held responsible, but he's not to be held solely responsible. And this, to me, struck me as part of the problems that, you know, public sector unions, unions in general are sort of. Exactly. You can replace the board of trustees, you can replace the governor, but until you address the bigger system that these actors are playing in, you maybe are gonna be left with a slightly kinder or more palatable or more strategic bad guy, but not necessarily a different story.

AWG: This campaign especially challenges me as an organizer, because reacting to that, what you just said, I would've maybe said at the time well, okay, but still we have a campaign where we unelect Scott Walker or we get him to change his policies or we have a campaign to get moodies to change their policies.

Exactly. And you all were like, No, wait a second. What's even beyond that or below that, what's underneath that is our relationship to debt period. Or even making it possible to go into debt or not go into debt. Right. Let's attack that. Right.

ES: The more I started to learn about the features of what some sociologists and economists called the asset economy, the more obvious it became to me that labor unions and working people can center their demands around debt, we're gonna be screwed because right now.

The capitalist class is earning far more money from our debt than from our labor. Our exploitation is coming at faster and harder from putting us in debt than from undercutting us on the job, although they are also screwing us that way too. But to have debt be part of the, the labor movement , that was how I entered, was to try to think of like, how do we, how do we bring these two struggles together?

Now I'm just, everything debt everywhere, every year. Everywhere, everywhere. We joke about sometimes when you start working with a deck collective, you gotta put on debt goggles. The whole world just becomes this whole set of debt problems.

AWG: Let’s go back to New York, it’s 2012. Strike Debt, who would become the Debt Collective, created direct actions designed to get people to question the idea of debt, and also to scout for potential, longer-term campaigns to launch. 

One of those direct action tactics ended up both publicizing the idea that debt was immoral AND helped them find people to build campaigns around, wherein organizers would crowdfund enough cash to buy student or medical or other debt, on the secondary debt market, for pennies on the dollar. John Oliver’s late night show famously canceled millions of dollars of debt this way back in 2016. A sidenote, his staff actually heavily consulted the Debt Collective, as if they were going to partner with the group on debt cancellation, and then backed off and pretended it was their idea at the last minute. That’s show business! 

Anyway, Strike Debt organizers called this tactic the Rolling Jubilee. That name, Jubilee, echoed a previous successful debt cancellation effort back in the year 2000, when the eight wealthiest countries, including the US, had canceled billions of dollars of debt owed to them by poorer Global South countries.

These scouting actions from 2012 to 2014 led the organizers to focus more on student debt for two reasons. First, it was easier to agitate student debtors to fight, and second, a recent explosion in private debt had caused a dramatic increase in students with totally unmanageable loans. Student debt had skyrocketed by over 700% from 1995 to 2017, growing from $187 billion to 1.4 trillion. It’s now 1.7 trillion, held by 45 million borrowers, who are disproportionately Black, Indigenous and people of color. Eleni spoke to me about this too: 

ES: In 2010 is when the federal student loan policy changes in a pretty big way. Now we call them FFEL loans, which is basically a private bank, Sallie Mae or something, if you will, owns your loan, services your loan, makes all the money off of your loan. But if you were to stop paying on your loan for any reason, the federal government will pay this federal bank back to something like 97%.  

Fast forward to now, this type of loan, these FFEL loans, are part of what's potentially is one of the big sticks in the wheel right now with the actualization of the Biden's loan cancellation policy because they're classified in such a different way and whose interests they represent is so blatantly banks.

So anyways, 2010 that program has stopped. FFEL loans, the government's no longer providing a full guarantee to these companies. Occupy starts happening. T day, which is this day when the student debt load hits more than a trillion dollars. So it's sort of looming into focus as a sort of colossal issue. It starts sort of getting tracked on the radar in some ways by AARP. I I took great interest in this to learn that the AARP, the American Association of Retired People, begins tracking student loan data almost two years before the first teachers union starts, before AFT, the National Teachers Union starts tracking student loan data. Their sort of first public reports on the crisis of student loan debt for older people and just for people in general is like 2012 or 2013, and the AFT doesn't come out until about 2015 saying, “Hey, this is a problem”.

So there's kind of this like murky incoherent period between 2010 and 2015 where it's clear there's a problem, it's clear there's something people are not really sure what to do about it. And there's the kind of far left pull that comes from Occupy and Strike Debt, and then the Debt Collective, which are sort of holding the left pole of like, “Cancel it all”.

AWG: More than 1,400 colleges closed or went bankrupt between 2013 and 2015, and over 200,000 students had attended for-profit schools like ITT Tech, who had been publicly accused of defrauding their students. It had made mainstream news coverage, but those borrowers were still on the hook to lenders. In 2014, Rolling Jubilee canceled debt for some students of a for-profit college chain that had been accused of fraud, Corinthians. Altogether there were 70,000 former Corinthians students, and dozens of them had begun connecting online, in Facebook groups with names like the Evergreen College Avengers, which is where they met Strike Debt organizers. 

One of those students, who would go on to play a leading role in the campaign, was Ann Bowers.

Ann Bowers: I was born in Vera Beach, Florida. And I grew up there, moved around quite a bit. My father was a pastor. Then I went back to Vera of course when I got older, and I worked for an aircraft company in the marketing department, and as a marketing assistant, and I loved it. Trade shows, all that good stuff, advertising, PR, and that was right up my alley and I love doing it. 

So then I became disabled and I could not any longer do that. So I decided, if I get my credentials – I've got the experience, if I get my credentials, I can do a consultation business with small businesses from home. But I need credentials cause they wanna see those credentials. So I saw a commercial on TV about Everest University online, and I called for information. And they continued to call me daily. 

This was in 2011. Okay. And I finally keep them from bothering me more. I said, “Okay, go try to get me a loan from the government. Go ahead.” And I filled out paperwork for that FAFSA and all that, and the Department of Education released the funding in my name. I said, “Well geez, I wasn't expecting that”. I said, “They released money in my name, it's gotta be a good school. The department wouldn't just turn loose of money for a bad school”. 

I was naive, and still under the impression the Department of Education was looking out for the students. Well, I was in the middle of my bachelor degree. I'd already graduated with my associates with honors, and I was so proud, so happy. And, you know, I wanted to make my family proud of me. And they were. Well, middle of my bachelor degree is when I found out that there was problems at the school and they were getting ready to hole up, close the doors, run off, claim bankruptcy. Middle of my bachelor's degree, three years after I enrolled.

AWG: Wow, okay.

AB: Yeah. And they told me I had enough funding to get me through my master's. They took it all in three years. I tried to enroll in another school and they said, “You don't have any money left. And your credits are not gonna transfer. And your degree is no good”. I mean, talk about devastating. Very much so.

AWG: Ann was devastated, but she was also angry. She joined other Corinthians students in those Facebook groups, and Strike Debt organizers were there too, agitating them, pointing out how they had been taken advantage of.

AB: I went into that Facebook group that we had. I saw Hannah and Laura in there and they – we were all talking and they were talking with us and saying, “You don't have many options here, because these are the worst kind of loans in the world”. That made it worse. Well, but they said, “But we wanna help you”. And at first I was kind of leery. I just got burnt by education, something I believed in.

AWG: Strike Debt organizers like Laura and Hannah also had a unique theory about how debtors like Ann could organize together. “Our debts, together”, they said, “make us powerful”. Just as with labor organizing and the principle of collective bargaining, when workers refuse to work, employers have to negotiate. What would happen then, if debtors refused to pay their creditors altogether? They invited two dozen Corinthians students to come to a strategy meeting in San Francisco to figure out how that could play out. 

AB: Beginning of 2015, Laura and Hannah got with me again and says, “You've got to do this. You have got to come to San Francisco with us. We're having classes, having workshops, we're gonna teach you all about this, and we're gonna work on helping you guys”.

I went to San Francisco and they did workshops, teaching us all about these loans, the consequences of not paying them. I mean, they taught us every bit of it. They taught us about the pain funnel, how they got us roped in there, made us feel like we had to enroll. The way they sped the contract past us so we couldn't read it –  I mean, they were describing everything I went through.

So at that meeting we were there for several days, steadily workshopping and getting to know each other and each other's stories and all. And me and 14 others, 15 of us, said, “We're going on strike”. I can't pay it. I'm on disability. I can't afford pay for that what I didn't get, I wouldn't pay for it anyway. They didn't deliver. And so 15 of us that day, we had our pictures taken together, said we're on strike. And we were the first 15 students in this country to go on a student debt strike. 

AWG: Not all of the students at the training decided to go through with the strike. They weighed out the risks. And striking made sense for fifteen of them, who joined with the original Strike Debt organizers to relaunch and rebrand with a new slogan, Cant Pay, Won’t Pay, and renamed themselves the Debt Collective.

They received nationwide news coverage for launching the first ever student debt strike. Mainstream news outlets, The New Yorker, even Business Insider published their strike statement, which ended with a call to organize. It read:   

“We are not alone in this fight. Corinthian’s predatory empire pushed hundreds of thousands into a debt trap. But even beyond for-profit schools, tens of millions of students are in more debt than they can ever repay. And you are the debt collector, with powers beyond a payday lender’s wildest dreams.

To the Department of Education and to the lenders, servicers, and guarantee agencies who have stolen our futures, we say: Enough! Erase these loans.

To current and former college students across the country, we say: We stand with you to demand the end of a higher education system that profits from all our dreams. Join our fight.

We won't pay. We are the Corinthian Fifteen.”

AB: Either they were gonna come after me because of the strike, or they were gonna come after me because I didn't have the money. I couldn't pay 'em. 

So I was facing consequences either way. Very unfair consequences I might add. But with all of the workshops that we had out there and everything that they taught us, I just weighed the options, and striking was my only option. It was my only chance of getting out of this. So I'm gonna fight. I'm not gonna take it sitting down. 

And so did the other 14. They felt the same way. And we grew. 15 people that nobody knew stood up and said, “We can't pay and we won't pay”. We were being punished for what that college did. And those 15 of us started a ball rolling. We quickly, I say with rapidness, went from the Corinthian Fifteen to the Corinthian Hundred. The Corinthian Two Hundred. Finally we just went back collective. We had such a soar in membership. I mean all of them couldn't strike, but a lot of them did. 

And I did striker intake and spoke with each of these students on the phone, I cried with 'em. I mean, it was very, very, very emotional. But I was proud we took that stand because if we hadn't, this would still be going on and those schools would still be getting away with it. And they still kind of are. But we have grown so much that we are not just Corinthian, we are ITT tech. We are Art Institute. They were the first two to join us. Now there's so many schools, I can't even name 'em all, and they're coming more every day. 

AWG: Hundreds of indebted students from three different for-profit college chains reached out to organizers, asking to join the strike. And here’s where the story gets even more interesting, from a campaign strategy point of view. Now, I don’t play chess, but the Debt Collective organizers clearly made a bet  that they could eventually checkmate the Obama administration, if their first move was towards Corinthians. Because the administration had already started investigating the company, targeting them as the quintessential bad actor. Neither organizer put it this way to me, but I think the collective had laid a trap. And after the Corinthians Fifteen went on strike, the Obama administration fell for it. The deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, who is now the director under President Biden, reached out. Would the strikers like to come to DC to tell sympathetic administration officials their story? Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would be there, along with Ted Mitchell, the undersecretary, and others. 

AB: Ooh God, was I nervous. We all were. But yes, Rohit brought in the Department of Treasury. He brought in the Department of Education, Arne Duncan and Ted Mitchell, and there were 24, I think, state AGs on the conference call. And we went in this room and the 15 of us told our stories. Well, I didn't realize I was sitting right next to Arne Duncan, and when it got to me, everybody had already told the story. Everybody's got the same story. Same thing happened to every one of us.

I just looked up at the guys sitting next to me and I said, “Well, I guess I might as well go pick out my cardboard box for me and my dog”. He looked at me like, “What?” I said, “I'm serious”. I said, “You've ruined me”. 

AWG: Now this might have been the point in the meeting when Obama’s aides realized they were in deep shit. Here’s what they didn’t know but were about to find out. 

The Debt Collective’s campaign research nerds had come up with a way to make the case that the government was obligated to cancel the debts of students who had been victims of fraud, an obscure part of the 1965 Higher Education Act called Borrower Defense. The government was supposed to allow students to petition to have their debts canceled, except, there was no petition or application. 

So the Collective had created one, and working in the online Facebook groups, had collected thousands of applications. Which they had brought with them. To this meeting. In a big red box.

AB: Luke Herrine, which was our legal advisor, and he had a big red box full of defense to repayment applications. Well, Luke stands up. [laughs] He's sitting right across from me and Arne Duncan and Ted Mitchell. He picks the box up and he slammed it on the table. He looks right at Arne Duncan and Ted Mitchell. He goes, “We did your job for you. Here's X amount of borrower defense to repayment applications” Eyes were huge! They were stunned.

AWG: Needless to say, the officials were blindsided. The meeting ended with some vague assurances about next steps. But the debt collective kept collecting applications on its website. 

AB: And so we kept the application on the website, made it available to everybody and we were pumping, I mean, cranking application after application over to the Department of Education. And they had no way to process it! They didn't know what to do with them! They told us to take it off of our website and they put it on theirs. 

AWG: The administration basically copy and pasted the application the Debt Collective had created, and by the end of 2016 went on to process 86,000 applications, approving over 30,000 of them by the time Obama left office, canceling over $400 million in student loans for students from for-profit colleges. 

The group also pushed to participate in an official Department of Education rulemaking committee, setting up rules for debt relief alongside representatives of creditors. Their collective action had won them a seat at the bargaining table, with Ann as the debtors representative. 

AB: When the Obama administration was still in office, they took the Borrower Defense rule and we had a negotiation, Neg Reg rule making and negotiation. Make the rules all around Borrower Defense so that would be in full, not just a phrase. We were gonna lay the groundwork for it.

I was the first student ever to be on a negotiated rulemaking committee. They never had a student on that committee ever before. I said, “How can you make rules for students and not have them, you know, have one or two of them at the table?”

Well then they started with the FFEL. We can't do that. The ones that have FFEL loans are gonna have to consolidate into direct loans before we can do anything with it, because someone else is holding that loan. I said, “It's still a student loan and you back it”. I said, “And you expect me to go back to all these students that I'm representing. Oh, hey, good news people with direct loans, your loans are gonna be discharged. Oh, all of you with FFEL and FFELP loans. I'm sorry., but you're gonna have to go through some paperwork and consolidate and all this.” 

And I told them that. I told the Department of Education that straight up .

AWG: I think it’s important to note, that the collective didn’t rely only on the inside game during this time – they kept creating public pressure, and challenging the idea of debt, through creative direct actions that centered and amplified the voices of a multiracial cast of student debtors, who presented themselves both as the victims and the saviors in the story. In the summer of 2015, dozens of dues-paying Debt Collective members flew to New Orleans to create direct action stunts during a National Student Financial Aid Professionals conference. I highly advise watching videos from these actions, we’ll add links to them in the show notes. Here’s Ann describing one of those actions: 

AB: We had a booth in their convention hall without them knowing. We gave ourselves their big prize, which was free education for all. They freaked out! Then they always have a parade. So we crashed their parade. We're throwing money. We had a bunch of fake money printed up. Okay. And all of us had big handfuls of it. We had these fans with all the facts about for profit colleges that they don't tell people. Well, it was really hot. So people were taking those fans, and when one of 'em would start reading it, oh they’d elbow the next person to tell them to read it. They started throwing those fans down so fast.

AWG: But back to the inside game, and the transition to the Trump Administration. The rules Ann had been part of creating were so durable, that Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, although she tried to avoid canceling student debt, was ordered to comply by a federal judge in 2018, as Eleni recounts: 

ES: Betsy DeVos has become Secretary of Education and she signs every single borrower defense application that was discharged, that was successfully discharged, with a little memo that says, with extreme displeasure, because she hated that she basically had no choice but to follow the stipulations of the law and discharge these immoral and unjust debts.

AWG: But DeVos was able to slow down or stop most debt cancellation. Her department denied 130,000 borrower defense claims in 2020 alone. 

The collective, like so many of us, had to regroup after Trump was elected. All their allies in the Obama administration were gone. They turned back to base building, holding Debtors Assemblies in cities around the country, which were essential, because the shame of having unmanageable debt loads, sometimes over $100,000 in debt for one person, kept many from being angry, much less organizing together.

Being open about their debts, and pointing the finger back at the colleges, the creditors, and the federal government, reframed the underlying logic of student debt. Organizers like Ann even wore red squares everywhere hoping they would invite conversation and connection.

AB: We just kept talking. We kept talking to students, kept talking to just people. I'd be in the grocery store. We wore these red felt squares. Okay. I had it all over my purses, my suitcases, my clothes. I never went anywhere without a red square. And that red square. people go, “What is that red? That red square for?” Something simple, but it got attention.

AWG: Along with the base building and casework, the Debt Collective continued to amplify the stories of many different kinds of debtors, building on their strength of shaping public narrative, using direct relationships with reporters, with the staffs of federal elected officials and, soon, their ability to influence the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates, whose campaigns started launching in early 2019, as Eleni recounts. 

ES: This is also when Bernie Sanders and Representative Jayapal proposed some of the first college for all legislations, which included not only free college, free public college for all who want it, but also full student debt discharge. So that was in 2019 and when that legislation went live, when they made the announcement of that, they brought the Corinthian Strikers to be part of that.

AWG: Democratic presidential primary coverage dominated the airwaves in the summer of 2019, as candidates like Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren maneuvered to demonstrate that they were champions of different parts of the Democratic primary electorate, including making promises to cancel student debt once they were in office. 

ES: Elizabeth Warren was in the at least 50 K camp, and then Biden was in the 10K.  I think it's probably worth noting that, if people haven't already put this together, that his campaign promise to cancel student debt is actually better, offered more, than the policy he actually signed a month ago.

His campaign promise was to cancel at least 10k of debt for families that make under $125,000, and cancel all debt for everybody who attended HBCUs and public universities. And that second part is the part where he sort of fell off it.

AWG: This was a huge narrative win for the collective, which had been arguing that the federal government had the power to cancel all student debt, without waiting for students who had been defrauded to apply for relief. Their demand was starting to move into the mainstream.  

But what accelerated the popular acceptance of the president’s debt cancellation power, ironically enough, might have been Trump’s response to the pandemic. 

ES: The pandemic actually, in a lot of ways, really enabled a new strategy to come to being.

Because what Trump did in 2020, by pausing the payments, was proving the exact power that we had been arguing. To say that this power rests with the executive office, the power to take action on these federal loans lies with the president's pen. And he proved that by pausing loan payments.

As far as the legacy of the Trump administration, I think in some ways that was the greatest legacy, the standout moment was the payment pause. Because that was the sort of proof of concept that we had been trying, that we had – we knew existed. He established the proof of concept.

AWG: And then, Joe Biden was elected. And the question for the Debt Collective was, will he keep his campaign promise of canceling student debt for nearly every borrower? And, will he keep the pause on repaying student loans?

ES: When Biden gets elected and he gets elected on this promise, where you kind of go into like, “Okay, it's go time. Like now it's time to make him make good on this promise”. The payments are on pause. This is huge. Biden is elected. This is also huge. 

So the strategy that we adopt is like, “Okay, now it's time to dial in on this strike”. And so we call for the Biden Jubilee 100, a hundred people who are going to go on strike when Biden turns payments back on. And we start a campaign of getting these people to come forward as a way to be spokespeople for the strike as a strategy. 

More than a hundred people signed up to be part of the Biden Jubilee. But we kind of called this Biden Jubilee 100 to be the ambassadors of this strike. We realize too that now the time has come to really sort of turn up the heat we have. This is the moment to get into the streets to the extent that the pandemic will allow this to happen.

So initially we had planned for the Biden Jubilee 100.  We were planning a big direct action at the White House in January in anticipation of the payment pause ending. I think it must have been early February that payments were gonna end. So we're sort of in the flurry of trying to get this mass action together in front of the Department of Education and, days before Christmas 2021 the President announces another pause on the loan payments.

This is huge for us. This is huge because we feel like we just have time to keep building and the Biden Jubilee kind of breaks into like just a broader strike. We go pretty hard at launching. The payments we're going to resume on May 1st. That was just revved us up even more, of like, go ahead and try to turn payments on May Day.

And so in January we call this big meeting. Hundreds of people show up on a Zoom call in January, two years into a pandemic. The drum started beating, “We are going to the Department of Education and we are not coming back until our debts get canceled. Here's how it's gonna go down”. We start, like, pumping this launch up to go to this April 4th day of action that we were calling Pick Up the Pen, Joe. And we start a strategy. 

That payment pause, what it did is it gave us time to sort of broaden our organizing. Instead of just getting the Biden Jubilee to show up for a day of action now we wanted hundreds of people to show up. And not just people, we wanted organizations to join us. We knew that we were never gonna win this alone. This is gonna have to be a whole coalition. So we also started during these months, between January and April, of getting all of these different organizations to, to come forward saying, “Yes, student debt cancellation. Yes. That's an issue for Black women, getting the NAACP to join on. That's an issue for workers getting this bevy of labor unions to sign on to a demand for full universal cancellation.   

The proof has been out that this power rests with Biden. People were trying to dodge, saying, “Well, we can't really ask Biden to cancel the loans because we don't know if he really has that authority”. So we got a FOIA from a memo that exposed the president's power to cancel loans that had been totally redacted in a way that revealed that the White House didn't want to admit how much power, didn't want it to be known how much power they actually had to act on this issue.

So we kind of have this like odd thing that's going on, which is that we know that Biden knows that we know that he knows that he actually could pick up his pen and cancel debt, but he's taking this sort of Bartleby, the Scrivener move and just saying, “I'd prefer not. I, I, I, thanks, but I'd prefer not. I do have the power to cancel student debt, but I'd prefer not”.

And so we're building pressure to make that obvious. He's the one who's standing between you and your debt relief. We had this fantastic day of action in April. The next day he announces yet another payment pause, and this is after when he announced the one in December. He was like, “This is it, this is the final one”. So on April 4th, we were in front of the Department of Education. April 5th, he says, “Okay, payments are now gonna turn back on on September 1st”. 

As we had assessed it, it's like, really, it's kind of all up to the old man. When you do a power analysis, there's Congress. It actually would be not helpful to have Congress taking a move on this because it's not gonna go anywhere if Congress tries to pass a student debt cancellation bill, and it's just gonna sort of excuse the president from actually doing what he needs to do.

So we keep up this move of like, “Who is Biden gonna listen to on this?” So we keep sort of doing organizing,  dialing in some of the people who are really impacted by student debt cancellation, people that Biden wants to be seen as a champion of. Black people, working class people and folks in labor unions. Old people. And we start really trying to sort of highlight those voices. We have a series of Black women debtors assemblies unleash a fantastic video about freedom dreams and the Black women's leadership and the struggle for student debt cancellation.

We get some surprising movement from labor unions, who have been sort of flat footed on this issue. And we are able to get labor unions beyond just the teachers unions, who sort of have established some kind of organizing work on student debt cancellation. We get a lot of other non-education unions, non feminized work unions.  here's a whole conversation that we had there of who are the workers that Biden thinks are the real workers that are gonna help him catch his eye on this?

And we start organizing older people. Write this piece in the summer of 2022 about the fact that the fastest demographic of student debtors, the people who are becoming student debtors at the quickest rate, are folks 62 and older. It's not just that it's sort of a, a tragic story that old people are living their ends of their lives in debt, but it also really exposes the failures of student debt as a policy for financing higher education, because it exposes how trapped people end their lives with debt. 

That was the new spark in the fire. We organized the call out section of our strike, we want it to be 50 debtors over age 50. We have like 500 now. When we say, “Are you here because you're old and in debt?” And they're like, “Hell yeah!” So that's been exciting to build and watch. And then the end of August, Biden announces his cancellation policy. Which I think folks in the Debt Collective and members of the Debt Collective had really mixed and varying reactions to.

We had a meeting of older debtors, I remember, the week after his announcement and someone logged in and they were like, “Look, I almost didn't come to this call tonight. I'm just so mad. I'm so insulted. I'm supposed to be clapping? Like this is doing nothing for my loans. It's doing nothing for my payments. The only thing that's really this is gonna change is that now in January I'm gonna have to figure out how to come up with $500 a month”.

The fact that there's not an application process raised a lot of alarms for people. That there is an application and the application doesn't exist yet. That it was 10K is a small amount, that it's gonna be too cumbersome. I mean, there was really like a lot of sort of frustrations in this.

And at the same time, 20 million people when cancellation gets administered, will have their debts totally wiped away. And now we see the president like, “Yeah, come at me for trying to help debtors”. And that's a big shift. He was –that was not his calm strategy a month ago, six months ago. Certainly not over the course of  his career as a politician. So in that way it's really – it's not a win for the outcomes. It's a win for the method. We didn't achieve a win. We proved a method, which is that organized debtors have power.

AWG: Ann had mixed feelings too, following Biden’s big announcement.

AB: I was kind of disappointed and then Astra and I just – we had a discussion and she's like, It is disappointing, but it's a stepping stone. It shows us if we keep going, you know, we can climb that mountain with stepping stones, basically. It is not like he didn't do anything. He did do something and he's being fought the whole way with the for-profit lobbyists and, you know, people that think that college still costs, like what you can pay for with a part-time job. It's not like that anymore.

But it's a good feeling when you have all these people, instead of ridiculing you for not paying your debt, now they're saying, “Thank you. Thank you for all you've done. Thank you for all your work”. That's a great feeling. 

AWG: I think there’s so much to learn from this story, and that we can continue to learn as this one campaign plays out over the next months and years in the courts, and as candidates on both sides of the aisle line up for and against the interests of 47 million student debtors. And of course, as campaigns for canceling medical and other kinds of debt take off. 

As Eleni points out, one of the biggest takeaways might be that what can seem impossible or laughable can one day become mainstream. But not without visionaries who can create a vision, and then build a plan and a base around it.

ES: It was ridiculous in 2010 and 2009 when people were talking about student debt cancellation. It became, you know, just kind of keeping the long march and not being laughed away.

AWG: And to be clear, I was one of the people who, seeing Strike Debt’s first public actions in 2012, thought to myself, “That’s nice, I’m glad they’re doing that, but canceling debt? That’s never gonna happen”.

Reflecting on this story, another lesson that’s important, I think, is that it’s common for an outside, rebel organization to stumble when we get the chance to go into the negotiating table with our targets. And to stumble even more when we get invited to participate in something like rule-making, or coming up with the specific bureaucratic language needed to implement some of our demands. 

The Debt Collective was fortunate to have several unique kinds of talent on their team during this time. They had risk-taking rabble rousers, skilled in the performance art of public protest, who were also adept at identifying their audiences, and the messengers they needed to activate. They also had the ability to recruit and develop leadership and participation by debtors who were Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as seen in some of their earliest public actions, and a willingness to put those debtors front and center. And they also had policy wonks and research nerds who could figure out how to use federal law against the Obama Administration, to gain the leverage needed to cancel student debt. And they weren’t afraid to use the inside game while still keeping up the pressure on the outside.

As Eleni noted to me, they weren’t afraid to keep firm in their demands, even as they got greater proximity to power over time.

ES: Keeping the demand far to the left, holding the left pole, I guess, on it and having that backed by demands and also actions to follow it. That there were people who had gone on strike with that as a demand of free college for all. That's the real lesson there. 

AWG: Ann offered a similar reflection.

AB: The fact that we all stood together in solidarity and we spoke the same message. That makes our message louder. The larger your numbers, the louder your message. Focus that negative energy you're feeling from what that school did to you. Focus it on the right people, people that can do something about it, and stay on them.

You don't stop. You don't just write one letter and stop. No. And you don't just do one action and stop. You go places where they are. You're in their face constantly, and you talk and you tell your story. We've got the truth on our side. I mean, it's the truth. And I don't see how anyone can really lose when you've got the truth on your side. Standing together, that makes you strong.

AWG: One last lesson that really spoke to me, as someone who has been part of organizing drives that tried to agitate and recruit undocumented immigrants, janitors, public housing residents, and working class parents, to decide together that their conditions were not their fault, and that they were entitled to so much more, was the willingness of Debt Collective organizers, most of whom were themselves student debtors who had been once ashamed of their debts, to really experiment with how to transform that shame into outrage.

ES: I think part of the thing here is really to have the combination of a clear analysis of actually what is driving hardship in people's lives. And to make space for people. 

Something I think it's really powerful is debt is not something that most people talk about. It's a financial relationship and it's a psychological relationship, and one of the projects of debt is to impose a moral order, that the debtor owes the creditor something and is obliged to that. And it also oftentimes casts debtors with a kind of shame or guilt for not having enough, that they have to become debtors, for not being able to pay.

One of the successes is to have this clear material analysis and also kind of acknowledge this is something that people… feel there's a lot of psychological work to be done there. The real signature organizing move of gathering these debtor's assemblies is making space where people can say, “Hey, we see you. We see you as having like more than just a drawer full of unopened bank statements”. You know, these, these loan statements.  And we see that those loan statements are actually part of the power and we all put them together and can organize around them. So I think that combination of like really a clear analysis and also really tuning into what the sort of the subjective realities of this inequality are, what it feels like to live with debt, I think has also just been a really important part.

AWG: Since Biden’s announcement, Ann has been helping a nationwide veteran’s debtors committee get off the ground, and the collective has been holding organizing calls for older debtors and Black debtors, to support strategizing in advance of a possible resumption of debt payments in January. Eleni says, there’s still so many organizing opportunities on the table

ES: So we're trying to figure out, how much leverage do we have in this window right now? How much organizing can we do? How much can this be pushed? Always the organizing question –If we have a realistic assessment that we probably won't win, is there still a good fight to be made, to go down? Sort of making these arguments loud and clear so that when they come back up again, because they certainly will, we will have already laid some kind of groundwork.

And then continuing to build for the strike. Continuing to drive home that message that people can't pay and they won't pay on these unjust loans. On the student debt horizon where we see the next few month and the next year of the debt collective is to really draw out that like, student debtors are often also medical debtors are often also housing debtors are also sending their kids to schools that are, the school buildings are in debt. Drawing out the kind of the 360, the connections of debt and indebted life, I think is also part of the sort of the next scope. 

That's one of the major things that we hear from Mitt Romney, et cetera, is like, “Well what are you gonna do after you cancel student debt? Cancel housing debt? Canceling medical debt?”

And we say, “Hell yeah we are! Like, absolutely”. Continuing to stitch all of these issues together, to see them not as single issue campaigns, but part of the same project.

AWG: Thanks to Ann, Eleni and the other Debt Collective members who shared their stories and insights with us. You can follow the Debt Collective on all the socials, and we have a campaign writeup and links to their actions at www.forgeorganizing.org and www.trainingforchange.org.

If you want this podcast to get to more organizers fighting Amazon, Apple and even Spotify, help us hijack the algorithm by leaving a rating and a review in your podcast app. Also, just a heads up, we’re almost at the midpoint for this season, and we’re going to take a month off. New episodes will roll out again in mid-January.