Episode 10: Canceling Student Loan Debt

This week’s guest, Winter, an organizer for the Debt Collective talks about the emotional breakdown that led him eventually to a life devoted to student debt activism.

After a bad experience with a negligent financial aid officer at university, Winter found himself saddled with almost $140k in debt and more than $50k in private student loans alone. When he realized that his career path as a philosopher and academic would not be lucrative enough to pay even his monthly payments, he made the decision to learn more about his loans and get involved in overthrowing the financial industry.

In this episode, Winter tells Nikki about his activist’s journey from his early days with Occupy Wall Street to his role with the Debt Collective, the Strike Debt initiative and the Rolling Jubilee project that raised money to bail out Americans struggling with predatory loan debt.

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Transcript

Nikki: I’m Nikki Nolan, and this is Matter of Life in Debt. A show about people in the United States and their student debt. Today’s episode, Canceling Student Loan Debt.

I talk with Winter, an organizer for The Debt Collective. In our conversation not only did I learn so much about the history of the fight for student debt cancellation. But also about some of the reasons we got into the student debt crisis, to begin with.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

Welcome to the podcast. It’s so good to have you here.

Winter: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me here. I’m so super excited to be here.

Nikki: So let’s get into this. How much student debt do you have?

Winter: I actually just pulled up my spreadsheet because I used to not keep track of it, but I really, I, I turned something, turned in my brain where I was like, I’m going to start keeping track of every dime that they claim that I owe them. And so right now the total, including interest is $137,176 98. And that’s as of last March. It’s probably a little higher actually.

Nikki: Are they federal? Are they private?

Winter: It’s a combination of both. So let’s see the private ones if I do the quick math, looks like it’s about $25k and $60k. Wow. The private ones are $85k, which means that the public ones are probably around $50k, which is completely crazy. But yeah, they’re really crazy part about that though, is that the principle on all of this is $78,000 and the interest is $58,000.

Nikki: Ah, what do you know what your interest rates are?

Winter: Depends on the different types of loans. So the federal loans, the federal loans are all 6.8%, and pretty much all the private ones are 10.8%, which is completely, completely scanned when I was. 20 years old and yeah, by Navient, which used to be Sallie Mae who are like, want to get more evil corporations known to all student debtors, the evil Sallie Mae tried to change their name to Navient. And so they get to, they could hide from their bad press, but we know who they are.

Nikki: So, did you purposely choose private versus public or how did you get into that loan composition?

Winter: Yeah, it’s such a kind of banal story. And it really, to me though illustrates how absurd and awful this system is. I was 20 years old and I had a little bit of money from my father and I was going to a state school for my undergrad and I wanted to study abroad in England. And that was the only place I could go because it was the only language I spoke and it was expensive.

It was like, $25 grand or something. I knew I would need more loans from my last year in college too. So I knew I was going to rack up $40 or $50 grand just to finish. So I went to my father and at that time we were pretty solidly middle-class, but he was going through a moment. It was just called that I’m not going to get to the full story, but he was having some financial difficulties and did not. Couldn’t really support my wish to study abroad.

I asked him, do you know, how does this work? Do I, you know, do I fill out FAFSA? Can we get some aid? And then he was like, no, I think our income is too high. I don’t think you’re going to get any aid. So it is just, you should just take out the loans. You’re not going to get aid. I went to the financial aid office and I told them I need money for study abroad. And I think that, or we make too much money to get aid. And so I’m not kind of, I’m not sure what kind of loans I should take out. I’ve never filled out any forms or anything.

And the woman literally. I mean, she, I think she was distracted. She literally just gave me a pamphlet. From Sallie Mae.

I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. And I didn’t ask my father. I was just kind of like, Oh, you just go to this website and you, and you just fill out a form and then you get the loans, I didn’t know, private federal, none of that stuff. I knew I didn’t, I didn’t know what that was doing. I just needed the money. And it was like, the deadline was coming up and it was like on their website, it was just like needing student loans. Here you go. It was like, okay.

So I did that and they gave me, you know, $25 grand or whatever it was. Yeah. And. That was how it started. I mean, it’s so crazy. It’s like, I mean, when I look back at it now after, you know, a decade of, of understanding the system and being an organizer and activist, I’m like, The financial aid officer really should have given me a FAFSA, what the hell was she doing? Was she trained by Sallie Mae and getting kickbacks? I know that that actually did happen. In some places, it is not likely because it was a state school, but it’s possible. Or we should just like, didn’t want to deal. It was a bad day. It was cranky. It didn’t want to walk someone through the process. And I was like, here, go figure it out yourself.

You know? So I’ll never know, you know, to this day, I don’t know her name and it’s been 20 years who knows where she is, but. That’s how I ended up with these shitty, awful loans, but I’m sure that this helped someone get a yacht in some way, shape, or form, you know, one of Sallie Mae shareholders or CEOs or something.

Nikki: Okay. You touched on an interesting point, which was that Sallie Mae was putting people into those financial aid offices in the nineties and two thousand. So you actually, sometimes when you went to talk to a financial aid person, they were possibly actually working for Sallie Mae.

Winter: Yeah, it’s so fucked up. And when I first learned about John Boehner and I think it’s his daughter, right? We used to work for Sallie Mae and he was one of them, yeah, he was one of the folks who was the most adamant about bankruptcy laws and some of the deregulating, the student loan industry, and his daughter was working for the biggest student loan companies, the obvious collusion, and conflict of interest. It’s just so clear when you study the history of student loans. And if I ever. Got a chance to meet John Boehner and have some, some choice words for him, for sure.

Nikki: I’m really interested in some of this knowledge that you have about student loans, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, but first I want to learn about the impact student loans has sort of had on your life.

Winter: Yeah. And that’s, you know, they go hand in hand to be honest, that knowledge and, and, at a certain point, I guess we can get into it. But at a certain point, I kind of stopped learning about the system because I was like, this is, this is just a joke. You don’t actually need to know anymore, but that does go hand in hand because there was a moment where, I graduated from, undergrad and I had this $25k $30k, whatever it was from private loans.

And then I also took out some federal loans. No, I think I, okay. I continue to take out private loans. I took out more private loans for my last year at the state school. Cause I still didn’t know about FAFSA until grad school. So I had, I’d had all this private loan debt and I was working a really low-paying job in Brooklyn.

I moved to Brooklyn and. I had some PTSD in my childhood and really needed to get out of where I was and on long Island. So I was like, I guess I’m just moving to Brooklyn and I’d just love to take any job that I can, you know, I’m interested broadly in education and, you know, changing the world.

So I got a non-profit job paying $28,000 a year. I pay my own in a shared apartment and I couldn’t even make ends meet. I had to use a credit card just to get by. And that’s when it dawned on me. Oh my God, not only am I going deeper into debt, I’m never going to pay off these loans. It’s just never going to happen.

Cause I’m never going to be a wall street broker. Non-profit you, maybe you work 20 years and you make it to $80 grand or $90 grand. This is just never going to happen. And I was also enrolled in grad school at the time and in philosophy and I just, I had this realization, but. I was just never, that I was just in this debtor’s prison and I was never going to get out of it.

And I just, I remember I had a breakdown on the street. I just collapsed and just wept. I was walking with my girlfriend and we were talking about it and I just like broke. And that was around the same time that I was, I was taking these classes with Stanley Aronowitz, who in New York was a CUNY professor. He tried to run for mayor. He was a very well-known intellectual, radical intellectual. And he was giving a class on the history of socialism and communism in the US and him and his friends. We’re really adamant about, I was the only young person in the class, me and one other person. And they sat with us and they were basically like, we think the student loan thing, you know, we know you both have a lot of student loans and you’re feeling trapped by it.

We think that this is a big deal for millennials and that you should organize around it. You should talk to other student debtors and build a movement and really look at some of the larger systemic things that are happening. So it was through my own realization of my debtor’s prison and then realizing that this was a real potential issue to organize around.

That led me to get involved in student debt organizing, which completely changed my life. So in a lot of ways, it determined my life. It opened up the gateway for me to go into organizing and activism, which was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. So, yeah. It’s and I mean, it’s just had so many more impacts, like even during that time. So that was right before Occupy Wall Street happened. And like, literally that conversation they had with us was a month before Occupy Wall Street. So a month later, you know, I went, I went down back by Occupy Wall Street. I saw all these people with all these signs about student loans. Everyone was talking about student loans.

I met people who wanted to do a strike around it. And even though that process of trying to form this movement with others lasted years, I still was thinking about leaving the country because of my loans. You know, I was like, I’m not sure we’re going to win this fight. I might need to get the hell out of here. Cause I have no financial future here. And also tired of racism and the awful economic system we have here and the imperialism that we’re, you know, brutalizing people all over the world so we can live richly. And so I, I, seriously considered moving abroad and I actually tried it. So I really, and all of this was because of student loans, I mean, it really was student loans that was one of the guiding forces in my young adult life. So many ways.

I mean, it’s, it’s amazing the way that students note and just like. It’s dictated the lives of an entire generation and not in good ways. You know what I mean? I’ve yet to meet anyone who is like, Oh yeah, it made my life better. No, not, not one person in the thousands and thousands of people I’ve talked to didn’t want.

Nikki: No one, I have not talked to one person that was like, yeah, this is great. Or I, even, the people I’ve talked to who have paid off their loans have this deep pain inside of them. That is just unhealable. So it’s, it’s. Mind-blowing to me to read some of the information on the other side about the reasons why you shouldn’t forgive student debt is because it won’t activate the economy to the level of these other kinds of things.

And I’m just like, what is the price of pain?

Winter: Yeah, no, no. I think that’s really right. And I think what you can see, and especially what’s happened recently when, because our movement has been really successful and it took us 10 years to get these arguments into the mainstream, but. Once Biden’s election, it became really clear that some kind of student debt cancellation was going to happen.

It became very real. And I think that’s when we saw all of these very centrist and sometimes conservative policy coming out and being, Oh, it’s doing that as aggressive and as cancellations are aggressive and it’s not fair. And then there’s all these. Super wonky conversations around, well, should we cancel $50k or $75k? And what’s the most economical. And you can tell that these people have no idea of the psychological and it just very real concrete pain that this is causing for millions, tens of millions of people. Right. And it just shows you how these systems are built on just these economic calculations. Right?

I mean, it’s, and this is why you know at Debt Collective, we talked about the financial as the economy and I think that’s. What happens is it turns, it turns our policymakers into financial calculators when they make decisions about policies, as opposed to listening to the pain of their constituents, and then responding out of that, you know, like God forbid, we should make policy out of our heart and not out of some obscure calculation about the GDP growth.

I mean, it’s, it’s really, really disturbing. It can be hard to work within that system and to lift up this pain and have it addressed in a way that just gets met with numbers. It feels really dehumanizing and really violent. But, I mean, it’s only been recent that the numbers have been on our side, you know, started coming out and being like, well, actually not only does it stop all this violent pain that’s happening across the country.

It’s also good for the economy. So wait, how strange, you know, and so I think that it just shows how clearly it is the moment and we were right. All along in every way, you know? And, and now it’s time to put aside this absurd economic set of policies we’ve had for decades. It’s time to end them. It’s so clear now it’s just a matter of like building political will to make it happen. You know,

When we, when we like lookout in this world and this incredibly wealthy country we look at, and yet everyone’s broke, right. Everyone’s broke in debt. And yet we live in this incredibly wealthy country and like there’s something happened in my brain where I was just kind of like, this doesn’t make any sense.

Right. What capitalism does, is that a small group of people on top. Basically, or just like taking the wealth that the rest, of the country and the rest of the population is producing. Right? And they’re kind of hogging access to it. And they’re the ones who control what happens with it and where it goes and what, you know. And I think that that’s basically what a loan is, right. It’s basically like that the money that, that our ancestors worked, their ass off, the wealth that we. That we, I mean, our ancestors were the ones who build the buildings. Right? And like creating all the objects and like made this world that we live in. We, it was actually, it was us that did it. We’re the ones who like, it’s, it’s our collective wealth.

Yet there’s a small group of people on top who control all of that money. Right. And as soon as we want, like the tiniest bit of it back, I mean, it’s our money. As soon as they want it back. They’re like, okay, we’ll let you have it, but only with like massive interest rates, right?

Like, we’ll let you share, we’ll give you a little bit of money to go to school, but only if you know, you basically agree to like work your ass off, you know, work 70 hours a week at a job you don’t want because that’s the kind of economy we want. Right?

We want an economy where like the working people are exhausted. They can’t rebel and they just owe us so much money that they need to work seven jobs and they’re broke and they can’t quit their job and they can’t take any risks and they can’t join a social movement.

And so I think for me, when I understood that perspective, I was like, Oh, it’s not. There’s actually, there’s a strategy here. There’s a strategy of the ruling in class. And like it’s not by accident, you know? Like, and when you look at the history of student loans, like, you know, Ronald Reagan in the seventies said exactly that. I mean, he was basically like, we need to install tuition in the University of California system because these kids are entitled to the rebelling.

I mean, it’s clear as day, we need to wish to control these people because otherwise, they’re going to think that they’re entitled to this wealth that their ancestors built. Right? And I think it’s especially true when you realize that what was happening at that moment where the black and brown people who built the majority of this wealth were the ones that were in college.

They were the ones who were like really, especially in the University of California and, and CUNY in New York, we’re entering for the first time entering a mass into the free education system. And. You know, the old white, rich guard were like, we can’t have this. So the only way they can come into this system is if we, you know, install these like massive loans and basically put them, in debtor’s prison, you know?

So I think that’s, that’s really important, I think to understand that it’s, it’s not, it’s not just, it’s not an accident these loans didn’t come out of nowhere. Right? It’s a very clear strategy of the ruling class to maintain their wealth and power and control. It’s really that simple. Yeah.

Nikki: And it’s working so well.

Winter: It works so well. I mean, there are interest. Is their profits, that’s why I say like the interest is there yet, you know, the interest is their fourth home in the Bahamas. It’s like, that’s how it works.

I mean, this is the whole premise of The Debt Collector, but there’s a great power in us realizing that as debtors and then being like, well, let’s not give them that money because they’re irresponsible and they’re gonna use it for yachts.

Instead, I’m going to keep it in my community. I’m going to give it to my local grocer or my local, like black restaurant owner, or my family. That’s the responsible thing to do with this money and not give it to banks and, whoever is making a profit off of the government money. So that’s my spiel.

Nikki: I feel this is a good point to transition into what is your story? Let’s start early on what your dreams were through, where you are in reality.

Winter: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s really, I was thinking about that. What, where am I, where my dreams when I was a kid and I actually don’t know because I lost my mother at a young age. I was 10 and then my family has ripped apart. It was very, very rough and I really wasn’t up. A blur for years, but my entire like adolescent teenage years up until college, and even, even later, I really was dissociated and not really present.

So I kind of lost my dreams. He didn’t really have dreams. And so in a lot of ways, all I knew was that I needed to go to college. Cause that’s what people did in my class. You know, middle-class white suburbia to people. Did you go to college? And really that was my family and society’s expectations. And so that’s what I did, you know, and it wasn’t.

So it wasn’t really like I was going after something. I think actually I was running away, you know, I was running away from like a house in a, in a community where it didn’t feel right. You know? And so it was more just like seeking answers. Like what, why couldn’t, you know, why, why couldn’t I get the love and the care that I needed.

Right. So I really went. College was kind of a place where I could begin to think about these questions. Right. And so I took like classes in philosophy and psychology and religion, trying to like history and politics to make some sense of what happened in my life and in my childhood. In a lot of ways it was, it was less like chasing a dream and more like, maybe my dream is just to get answers right.

Just to like, makes some sense of, of my, my experience and my reality and my, my society, you know?

I had a total crisis when I had to go to college. Cause I don’t know what the hell I want to be. Like, I’m depressed, depressed. People don’t want, want anything. They just want to sleep. But I was like, so I was like, okay, well, at that time I liked sports. I was like, maybe I should be a sports journalist. Or I was like, Oh, computers. I was like, maybe I’ll be a computer scientist.

So I went, I actually declared computer science, my major. And I went to like two or three classes and I hated them and I failed all the classes and I dropped out. I wasn’t going to class. And I got lucky. I ended up taking one philosophy class and I just fell in love with it. And I was like, this is my people, you know, or like asking questions about reality and society. Who are we? What is this? And why is that bad? And so, yeah, so once, I took that class, I changed my major to philosophy. And then I, yeah, obsessed with it. Took philosophy classes for the next three and a half years.

Nikki: After you got your degree, what did life look like after you graduated?

Winter: I knew that I wanted to be an activist. I’ve been an activist in college and had been exposed to a lot of our policies in Latin America and a lot of history of us imperialism and colonialism. And I, you know, started questioning capitalism pretty seriously.

So, when I was in Brooklyn, I really started trying to figure out, I want to be a part of some kind of movement or some kind of, an organization that was thinking about what a different kind of world could look like, what different kinds of society could look like. Those were more equal and less violent, but I spent several years just kind of bumbling around. I went to different meetings and then nothing really seemed like it resonated until I about wall street.

And that’s really when like, things kind of really started taking off for me and my life really started to take form.

Nikki: Tell me a little bit about Occupy Wall Street and sort of like what happened for you there?

Winter: I remember the first day I went down there. It was right after the incident on the, I think the pepper spray. So it must’ve been late September, early October. And I remember going down there my first time and I just absolutely loved it. There was just a bunch of people in a hodgepodge kitchen, in a park next to wall street and they were like, there were a drum circle and a meditation area and like a little library. And I started, I was like, wait, like there’s no, this is all just self-organized. It’s just people who are just like, Oh, I’m going to make a library. And, but what really got me was there was an assembly and, apparently this was happening every night.

And there were like thousand people and it was a democratically run assembly with a facilitator. And we all broke into groups and talked about what we wanted our society to look like. And I met cool five or 10 people. We had an amazing discussion and this is really cool. Like this isn’t obviously, this is not just about like how fucked up wall street and financial capitalism is like, this is about like a generation of people or more, it wasn’t just my generation.

Who are like, something is deeply wrong with our society, you know? And we, we, we are looking for a completely different way of living, right. And of like relating to one another. And that actually like the problems of wall street and the problems in financial capitalism and problems with racism are actually like, they’re about relationships.

They’re about the way we live in about where we relate to another. It’s not just about like, you know, a hierarchical system and, whatever. So that, to me, it was, it was this like, Like two-part nature to want to Occupy Wall Street. That got me, that was like on the one hand that protesting the bailout and just like in general, the conditions of capitalist life in America, but dad, and, you know, just the, local and, you know, lack of a safety net and, you know, the police violence.

So a combination of like protesting that, but then also kind of, you know, getting together and talking about what kind of world do we want to see and what kind of. You know, relationships and communities do we want to have, what would it look like to have a fair world? What would it feel like? And so that immediately, I was like, this, this is a movement I want to be a part of.

This is, this is something really beautiful and powerful and huge, right. That’s just like taking, taking the country by storm, and really like creating, a ruptured, like a horrible system that we live under.

From Occupy Wall Street, we had started a group called the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, or probably about 10 of us, maybe 15 of us who were really committed.

And I joined maybe a week or two after after they had had a form, the group and. I remember, I went to a meeting at Occupy Wall Street, and I remember Andrew Ross and Pam Brown two very charismatic people who I think were really key to starting this movement and that they both kind of gave a talk on like, you know, the horror of student loans and how fucked up the economy is and how education should be freed.

You know, all the, all the kind of like core talking points, the Debt Collective uses now. And I remember them saying, you know, there’s. No, we don’t know the exact number, but there’s something like, you know, between five and 10 million people who are in default, right, who are beyond 90 to a hundred days of not paying their bills and are dealing with the consequences of default, which are, you know, a ruined credit score, wage garnishment, and they’ll lose their social security.

And they were saying, you know, these people are actually on strike. You know, if you look at it there, what we have here is a kind of strike. And like, what we need to do is organize these people into a group and say, instead of saying like, we are not paying because our financial life is too difficult and we just can’t make the payments instead, turn it into a voluntary strike and say like, no, actually we are on strike because the system is wrong and here are our demands, cancel the debt-free, free college, et cetera.

And so that was the first attempt to kind of like, I don’t want to say go on debt strike because there already is a debt strike happening. Righ?. I think that’s really important to acknowledge. But what we wanted to do was, was name it. Right. And actually bring those people together and say, actually, you have, you have the power actually.

Like if you realize that, like things that exist in the financial economy need our payments, our monthly payments to survive, then you actually realized by withholding our money, we actually have power over them. So that was our first attempt to really, I mean, in a sense it’s, it’s a union, right?

We tried to create a union to go on strike. And it was, it was really difficult in those early days. The country wasn’t quite ready for this movement. But we went out in public, started to talk about this and started to say like, it’s actually, the moral thing to do is actually not pay your loans.

And, we don’t want anyone to deal with the consequences on their own. So that’s why we’re building, a collective, a group of people who were actually gonna do that together. Right. And support each other through not paying their loans and whatever way that can look like. Right. It might look like deferring or forbearance.

So that was our first attempt and we saw it very quickly. The back last we got, and it wasn’t just from like conservatives and it wasn’t just from like baby boomers who had gone to college for a thousand dollars. And, we’re like, why can’t you pay your student loans?

Even people who are fairly liberal and progressive would be like, Oh no, well, but I mean, you sign a contract. I mean, that’s only fair. I mean, it’s like very. That’s wrong. It’s wrong not to pay your bills. That’s just like, that’s just wrong. And people couldn’t say why it was wrong. People just kind of had this like deep core, the intuition that this was just, this is what bad people did. this is what like dropouts and beatniks did like, and so that was really hard for us to push back against.

And it was, we really had to like say clearly, well, no, but like, think about it. If you. Like, if you believe that education is a public good and that it could be free like it is in most countries around the world, then why do we even have these loans? And so like, if we shouldn’t have them, why should we pay them?

So like, you know, took people away while to kind of like really settle into that logic. And I mean, when I say, awhile, I mean really until 2018 2019, I’ll tell Bernie Sanders because like, even now we still get people pushing back on it.

And I love Andrew Ross used to say, and I love this. He used to say that like, And Neo-liberal society, and like the financial economy that we live in breaking your contract is basically an equivalent to incest, right? Like it’s just like a taboo you just don’t do. And it’s not really a question of why. Right? I mean, except that once you start looking at it, it’s because well, the financial economy is run on contracts. And so if you, if you begin to say, well, maybe some of these contracts aren’t really legitimate. Then the whole system is kind of put into question the whole financial system, the whole system that wall street has created in the past 30 or 40 years is put into question.

And so I think that it’s taken a long time to really begin to question that basic assumption that you have to pay your bills. If you, if you, if you sign a contract, But I think it’s a really important one too, to challenge and to overturn, to say like, no, actually not really like the conditions under which we signed those contracts were actually very exploitative.

And that’s, that’s not, it’s not a coming together of two equals, it’s not like we both are having an equal amount of power in the society and we’re going to sign a contract that says we’re going to share this or share that, or you’re going to let me this, you’re going to lend me that it’s actually someone with no power at all. Coming and just like trying to do something that’s just very basic to their survival. And then someone with a lot of power saying, okay, fine.

We started to call it mafia capitalism because in a sense, we started realizing that like , the housing market, the education market, even just the basic consumer economy, it’s all run on loans. It’s kind of the mafia economy, right? It’s basically like these hedge funds and the banks that have all the control over the capital on our society. Are kind of like the mafia, and we’re just saying, like, we just need some, some way to live and they’re like, okay, well, you’re going to pay it back with 10% compounding interest for the rest of your life. You’re like, okay, fine. I just need to go to school so I can get a job, you know?

So I think it is really important to shift that narrative. And one of the biggest things that I see happen is when we. When we like really flip the script a little bit and say to people like these loans are illegitimate.

We say that people are like, why would he mean? And we’re like, well, we don’t think you should have them in the first place. Right? Because in a decent society, education would be free because it’s a public good. It’s good for society. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be free. It isn’t most of the world.

And so when that, if that’s the case, there shouldn’t be loans. Therefore your loans aren’t legitimate and you really shouldn’t even be paying them. This whole system of student loans shouldn’t even exist. And I think once you do that, it creates a kind of shift in your brain where you kind of say like, Oh wait a minute. Yeah. Like I was caught in a really shitty scam that the government was part of, and that the government was interested in because there were a certain set of ideologies and policies that told them this was a good idea. And once you, once you see it that way, then you can begin to look into how the system is created from a more like. Detached way and not in a way of like, how am I going to get out of it? But instead, like, what is this crazy machine that they built to trap me? And like, what are the ways in which, there are like little hacks and, little ways you can kind of break into it. And I think that, that that’s actually, I’ve seen that that can be really empowering for people to, to understand the system.

And especially from a different like moral angle, not as, I got to understand this because I got to get my way and not like in a desperate way, but in a, in a kind of like, Right. Okay. Yeah. So I’ve been fucked. Like, let me really understand and why and how, and then, I mean, like, especially if you’re in a dialogue with, others about that. Cause then you, then you’re not like so alone. And you’re like, Oh, it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t, it wasn’t a personal decision that I made. That was a failure. It was like all structural policies, set of policies that let an entire generation, or like tens of millions of people into the same trap.

And so it’s. I’m actually a very ordinary actually for being in this trap, there, it looked there are tens of millions of us in the strap, I think there’s something really, really

Nikki: 45 million, right. 45 around 45 million people are stuck in this trap.

Winter: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think one of the things that were unique about Obama, I’m not a fan totally of Obama’s set of work, but one of the things that were unique about him is that he actually did have student loans when he went into the office and Michelle both had loans and granted, they were lawyers and they weren’t super-rich. I mean, he started making money when he was in the Senate, but, to that point, they had struggled, but I think we’re seeing a new wave of like, AOC and Khin and Ohmar. They all have student loans and there there are others like young, progressive Congress, people who have student loans.

But I think one of the things that we’ve really been focusing on in The Debt Collective is, not just focusing on student loans, but like, we’ve been talking a lot about like household debt. Or like community debt and really seeing debt as like something that kind of moves through the whole community and through like households, because yeah, I mean, the stat is like one out of every six people in the United States have student loans, right. It’s 45 million out of 300 million. Right. But then like what you’re like, well, yeah, obviously like all the people under 15 don’t have student loans. So that, it takes out a big chunk and population and then you’re like, okay, wait a minute. But people don’t know like most of those countries don’t live. And studios all on their own. Like most people live in a home, right. Like with several other people. And so like when you’re like, actually the average family size, I don’t know what it is three, four, or five. Like when you look at it like that, you’re actually like, Oh, well, in that case, basically almost every student, almost every household in the United States has student loans basically. And then when you’re like, well, not only that, but actually, when you look at household finance, it’s not just student loans. Like people have often be about either mortgages or rent. Like they have some kind of monthly bill that’s at that, that they offer the place that they’re living there. You know, generally don’t own it. Even if they have a mortgage, they don’t really own it. And then they probably have some like medical bills, a decent chance to medical debt, credit card debt. I mean, it’s just like a ton of people, auto loans and then student loans.

So actually when you look at it, like you have entire companies run on debt. And so like the households that we live in are just drowning in debt.

And so I think it’s really important that we look at student loans, not just as like one issue that’s affecting these 45 million people. But as a really important part of how households are experiencing financial life in America. This is why on Occupy Wall Street. It was like the 99% cause it really is like the 1% are in Congress and Senate and that they don’t have, they don’t have households that look like this at all.

Like their households are not drowning in debt. Whereas I think it’s something like it’s actually like 80% of households have debt. So that 80% of households though, more or less, there might be like 5% that are pretty comfortable. But even folks I know in the, in the like professional, the middle class are really struggling with all the different bills and debts they owe.

And so I think that there’s something about student loans that hit at this, this fundamental way in which life is live in us, which is like we’re drowning in bills. Right. And debt is a more technical way of saying bills, right? Like that’s what I think that, that, that’s why I think that’s why there’s so much energy around student loans.

Right. Because clearly education, should not be putting people in these horrible situations, but it’s also once you graduate with that student loan, then you’re just walking into life with even more debt. And then, so I think it really does begin to shine a spotlight into like the horror, to be honest of living, living in the United States.

Like the way that money is lived, the way that money is distributed, the way that resources are distributed. And I think both of our stories, you can hear that in our stories like that, we realized like, Oh, I can’t live a life. Like I can’t live a regular life because even if it was a student though, it’s like, you know, if I have medical bills too, and credit card bills. And like, it’s not just my student loans that I’m worried about.

It’s like I was saying, It’s a basic economy where we have to go into debt to meet our basic needs and that is fundamentally wrong. And we should really resist all of these debts.

And so in those early days, we started talking about, a union, actually, we were kind of like, I think what we need as a union for debtors. I think we’re seeing the beginning of a movement, like the labor movement, where people are realizing they need to group come together and negotiate with their creditors do strikes, build collective power. The transition from Strike Debt to Debt Collective was there were two projects that kind of like created that transition.

We knew that we had to like put this analysis out there in the world. So one project we had was called a debt resisters operations manual. And it was like 10 chapters, one chapter on each type of debt. And just like how the system worked, just the nuts and bolts and then how you could resist in different ways. And then it was also kind of like an introduction that kind of framed like mafia capitalism, and , we shouldn’t have to go into our, our, into debt to meet our basic needs. At the same time we had heard about Tom Gokey, who’s now one of my co-organizers the Debt Collective. And he had heard, it’d been kind of like the word had been getting around that due to some like financial deregulations in the eighties, you could actually buy debt on the secondary market, like consumer debt, you know, buy this. Yeah. So, you know, we heard

Nikki: John Oliver did it right?

Winter: John. Oh, well, yeah. That’s a that’s another long story.

He didn’t, he didn’t credit us, which was really shitty.

Nikki: That is Shade that’s. Some shady John.

Winter: He, he talked to, I wasn’t part of the group at the time, but he talked to our organizers and. And steady credited the charity nonprofit. That was a spinoff of, what we did. And he didn’t talk about the five, six, seven years of social movement work that went into that process. He just decided it wasn’t worth it.

So as usual, you know, mainstream media, they don’t really like to cover people, power and social movements, much more interesting to cover charity. So it’s kind of how it goes, but yeah, so John Oliver popularized this concept, but at the time inactivate, it was, it was kind of a murmur.

People were like, That’s crazy. Can you really? So, Thomas Gokey, he lived upstate New York and he did it. He, he did really, he found a relationship with a deck, a debt collector, and he bought like a hundred bucks worth of debt. And he got like five grand in debt for a hundred bucks, something like that.

And so, we reached out to Thomas and he was kind of part of Occupy. And we were like, we’re thinking about doing this on a, on a broader level and fundraising. Maybe like $50 grand and get like a million dollars in debt. And then we can like, Really just like have a big stunt and to say the world like lookup weird and crazy and fucked up the system is like, what is it?

If your debt can be sold for 5 cents and then collected on it, the full value, what is it really worth? If you have a bill with a hospital and they just write it off on their taxes, or they sell it for 10 cents on the dollar, why should you have to pay wasn’t that actually the value of the cost? Where do that extra 90 cents go? What? It really shows that like the debt system isn’t really based on real value, right? Just like in Wall Street, everything, all these prices are just pulling in through speculation. And why should we have to pay the full price? If the debt buyers, the debt collectors are paying five, 10 cents of a dollar?

So we were like, let’s, let’s try to fundraise some money and get a bunch of debt. So we put on this big event, we had some folks who knew like some celebrities in New York, we put on like a big kind of like telethon, we called it. In New York City, we have like a whole social media campaign. We got some celebrities to kind of blog and tweet us. And we, we wanted to raise $50 grand, like I said, and cancel a million dollars. We ended up raising $800 grand or something at the end of the day. And we’re able to cancel like $30 million in debt.

It was a long process. It was very complicated to get into the industry and, create the nonprofit and figure out all the legal codes. And it was, super messy and complicated. And even like buying debt is a really messy process. You don’t know who’s that you’re getting, it’s all coded in spreadsheets and.

And it’s hard to get in contact with these debtors to even let them know that it’s canceled. So it’s not by any means like a way to fix the debt problem because it’s not sustainable. It’s really, for us, it was a way to, to demonstrate to the public how absurd this system was and to help people out I’m on the way let’s help out, five, 10,000 debtors get this debt canceled, but also show people like, look that cancellation can happen. It actually makes a lot of sense.

So we called it the Rolling Jubilee because there is this like, you know, biblical concept of, of canceling debt. And we were like, let’s revive this, this is actually an old tradition. That is, is we need it in modern times. Right. Cause we’re all drowning in debt.

So from there, we didn’t quite know what to do. And that this is a long story. There was a lot of like argument on what do we do and, group dynamics, but eventually subgroup of, of that, they found out that, a bunch of students in Corinthian College in California, we’re going on strike because they had learned about the fraudulent practices and their school.

Kamala Harris was actually suing them as the attorney general in California. Coming full circle with Kamala.

And so they got in touch with these students and they were like, look, we want to cancel this for-profit student loan debt. You were all going on strike. Why don’t we join forces? And we can see if other schools want to go on strike and we can actually build like a whole movement of people going on. Strike. And so this was really the beginning. This was when the Debt Collective started.

This was really the first project and campaign of the Debt Collective was to organize with for-profit students who have been scammed. And at this point, there were all sorts of reports coming out, out on the fraudulent practices that these schools were doing. I mean, it was so predatory, they were just lying to students flat out about job placement rates and their connections in the community. They were taking out loans in their names without telling them, I mean, it was just like the wild west. It was such a deregulated market.

As, as we started to learn and what we started to see as we piece together, the story was that as the federal government and state governments had cut back on funding to public schools and, therefore they couldn’t enroll as many students. Then as the markets were deregulated and the private university system opened up to all sorts of shady practices. These for-profits formed and really started preying on low-income communities and their dreams.

That kind of started to put the pieces together. I’m like, Oh, wow, look, this is not only is this impacting people would go to public schools and NYU and private schools. It’s actually, there’s this whole group of students who are just completely fucked that are already coming out of poverty. And then on top of that are going to these fake schools that are giving them shitty diplomas that won’t get them anything they’re totally being preyed upon.

So this was starting to come to light. And so there was a real clear campaign there and the Debt Collective was able to organize thousands of these students and actually created a form.

One of the things that we found has worked really well. And in doing this kind of work with debt is when you can find like, like we were saying earlier, you really look at these systems closely and you can find like the legal loopholes. And so one of the lawyers on our team found this loophole that basically said, we’re not loopholes. There’s just a piece of law in one of the higher Ed bills. And it basically said if your university has created any kind of state crime or have basically committed any kind of crime or it’s broken the law anyway, your loans are actually no longer valid tuition is basically void.

Nikki: Wow

Winter: Yeah. So what the Debt Collective did and the genius way I think is created an actual form, like the creator form for the government. To say my school broke the law. Therefore you only debt cancellation. And then, organized, I think it was like 10,000 students or so who filled out this form. And then the Debt Collective went to the department education called the meeting, got a meeting with like the deputy secretary or whatever. I came in with boxes of these forms.

And then that started a process of actually figuring out, okay, the part of education was like, you’re right. And now we need to make a process for how we’re going to figure out how to cancel these loans. So that was really the first time that, you know, we, we proved basically that student loans could be canceled. It should be canceled.

So really the next step from there was to say like, Oh, actually it’s not just the for-profits that are, that are, you know, a scam. It’s actually the whole education system, the whole higher ed. And so all the loans should be canceled. So that’s kind of like the long, the long story from the first, the first attempt at a debt strike and occupied in the park and Occupy Wall Street up until, you know, now our, our strike and we have one going on now.

Nikki: Tell me a little bit more about the student debt strike.

Winter: We are calling it the Biden Jubilee 100 and it’s modeled basically on the first that strike we had that was successful, which was the Corinthian 15. And those were the 15 students who went on strike from their for-profit debt. And you know, that enabled us to get a meeting with the power of education and get, you know, over a billion dollars with debt canceled.

So we know that striking, striking our debt, is a powerful, powerful thing to do. And it really not only grabs the attention of the media and politicians, but it also allows us to really take the moral ground to say we don’t actually owe the, we should not be paying these bills. We don’t know what these bills.

You know, it’s modeled after that first campaign and, we basically recruited a hundred striker, a hundred, a student debtors among our networks to go on strike. And it also gave us the opportunity to build this really powerful community of a hundred student debtors, who, you know, were coming together every week with different trainings. And we’re, you know, we’re having training around, you know, how to talk to your neighbors and about debt, how to talk to the media about.

So really it’s, it’s about building pressure, right? Building community and building pressure. To lift up our voices as much as possible and really create like a groundswell so that Congress and Biden can not ignore it. And I think, at this moment, we really are aware that there’s been a lot of conversation in the Senate and among Biden around whether and how much student debt to cancel.

It’s pretty clear that there’s going to be some kind of cancellation. And so our goal is to get him to cancel all of it.

In the Senate Warren and Schumer are pushing for $50,000. And so we’re pushing them to say no, you need to cancel all of it. And actually Joe Biden can do it with just one signature. It’s actually that simple, just one stroke of the pen and an executive action. And Joe Biden can cancel all the federal student loan debt. and so it’s really something very simply to do. It’s, you know, an incredible, economic stimulus in a really challenging time of economic recession and pandemic, the studies have shown that it would create, like, I think a million jobs a year, like almost a hundred million dollars it would add to the GDP per year. If it closes the racial wealth gap, like it’s a clear, like answer to a lot of the problems we have, and it’s really simple and you can just do it. So really that campaign is to pressure into, to just like do it. Don’t be afraid to just take the common sense and just cancel the debt.

And so, you know, we, we are, are hopeful that we will be effective and will win the debt cancellation. But even if we don’t, we’re going to, keep campaigning and striking until we win. So it really is it’s a commitment for the longterm to really win this, this, this campaign. So even if it takes longer than a hundred days, we’ll just create the Biden Jubilee, a thousand or 10,000 or a million, whatever it takes to get the debt canceled. So this is just the first step in kind of building out our union and the collective power that we have as debtors.

Nikki: So if somebody wanted to get involved or just like follow this movement, what would they do?

Winter: Yeah, so they can go to debtcollective.org and they can sign our petition. We have a petition that we’re calling on Biden to cancel this debt. So, you know, sign the petition, spread that to all their family and friends. Join our union. They can. You know, they can give dues if they want to support the movement and five, $10 a month, or they can sign for, sign up for free.

They can start coming to our campaign, calls our training. They can get involved in a local group. They can lead an action in their community, you know, at Senate or Congress person’s office. So there are a lot people can do to, to get involved. There’s, you know, a different from the simplest of just, you know, sign the petition to really getting involved in the union and being an active member and an activist.

Nikki: So one thing I want to ask you, because this comes up time and time again. I see this all over social media, how can bite and just sign away the debt with the stroke of a pen, like?

Winter: Congress get granted the secretary of education, the authority to quote-unquote compromise, waive, or release its claims over overall student loans. So that means that, Biden can instruct the secretary department education to release, basically give up their claim of all $1.5. A trillion dollars of federal student loans.

And it’s actually, it’s the same authority that Trump has used to. And he’s executive actions to like pause the interest loans, interest rates. So it, you know, we know that it’s possible, it’s in the law. There’s really nothing stopping them. You know, we, one of our lawyers put out a white paper years ago on this, on this issue. It would hold up in court, so you should just do it. You know, it’s really simple. It, he has the legal authority. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s written in black and white.

Nikki: So let’s say everything is canceled. Do the taxpayers have to lift that bill who pays for this?

Winter: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the beauties of this, policy suggestion is that it actually doesn’t cost anyone any money. I mean, it’s actually, so the Nber institute put out a report that says that student loan cancellation would actually be a boost to the economy. It wouldn’t actually cost money. It would be a boost.

So. You know, I mean, there’s, there’s like, you know, these arguments that it hurts the government’s bottom line, but I mean, it’s actually like, it doesn’t really do anything to the government’s budget. I mean, the government’s budget is so, so large and there’s, you know, there’s this movement called Modern Monetary Theory about how like, you know, government deficits, especially the small amounts of money really don’t matter.

And so it’s really, it’s not. It’s not true that this is going to raise taxes. That’s just not true. It won’t do anything. You know, it may cause a headache for a few bureaucrats in Washington to figure out how to like move some spreadsheets around. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t cost taxpayers money and it’s good for the economy.

So it’s like, why wouldn’t we do it? Right. And, and like, it just helps people who are suffering tremendously. So it’s in a, in an absolute crisis we’re in. Senator Elizabeth Warren. I said that this is, the best way to stimulate the economy through executive action. So by you do it immediately. Right. And so I think that’s really clear.

So yeah, when you have people that high up in the government, Elizabeth Warren, you know, knows this stuff better than anyone. So, you know yeah.

So it is frustrating when people say that, because I think it’s, you know, the way that debt works on the federal level, it’s like that doesn’t actually, you know, Government spending doesn’t directly, raise people’s taxes and the way it works. So I think that’s actually really important to say

Nikki: Yeah. I think what the Modern Monetary Theory basically says that. Taxes are, and I’m going to butcher this because I’m just learning about it. That taxes are a way to fight inflation. It’s not really like the money that is going into the deficit.

Winter: Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, they say straight up they’re like government spending does not mean you need to tax. And it’s, I mean, it’s even arguable whether or not that cancellation has government spending. Cause most people aren’t paying their student loans, so it’s like, they’re not even getting this money. So it’s like, you know, it’s, it’s really they’re actually I, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s. It’s really absurd. It’s really absurd. That’s why I say like, the worst that’s going to do is it’s going to like the only downsides of canceling student debt that I can imagine is that it gives a bunch of bureaucrats, the headache on how to figure out like their balance, their budgets, in the department of education, which they’ll figure out, you know, they’re paid enough to do that. Businesses do it all time. It’s not a big deal. Like it’s pretty standard practice to, to cut, cut your losses on bad debt. You know, it’s just like, it’s the same thing happens all the time in corporations and the businesses. It’s really a simple procedure. I’m sure the government can figure out how to do it.

And then the, you know, there’ll obviously be an impact on the private servicers and that’s, that’s too bad, you know, I mean, this, these are like corporate corporations that have preying on student debtors for, you know, decades. So I there’s no love lost the day, lose some other income, you know, and that the shareholders do, you know, it’s, for me, that’s not a big deal.

Well worth it. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s an, it’s a sad sacrifice, decent welfare services we’ll have to make, you know, for the good of the country.

And so when, like when the politicians talk about like, Oh, well we don’t need cancellation. We just need to clean up the public student loan forgiveness program or the income-based program. They’re like no less than 1% of people are making it to those programs because you’ve created an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. You know, there’s made the right wing look right about government and competence. Like it’s just an absolute nightmare. It’s government and private it’s a total shit show. And so like, it’s clear that the only real solution is just to like, At the head off the beast, just kill the student loan system, you know, and like make education free.

Like we have the damn in money. So it’s really frustrating when, when they try to like bring us down that road, you know, one of the things that happened in the Debt Collective was they started this process with the Obama department education, Arne Duncan, and they were not exactly looking out for borrowers, right? They were very business-friendly folks in department education. The Obama of staffing was not, it was not progressive in any way, shape or form. So we’ve really had to fight tooth and nail for, for cancellation and for forgiveness, but it did start to happen. What happened with Trump took office was that, I mean, Betsy Devoss came in and she’s just like, you know, absolutely no canceling. We were like, well, it doesn’t matter what the law says. Like our hearts tell us that it’s not, that it’s not right. And so we’re not going to do it. And so basically that entire program that, that, you know, that the Debt Collective had really initiated. Just the gears. I mean, it was like the Trump administration threw sand in the gears and basically stall for four years to give anyone forgiveness that they were, they were due. Even with the, with the Obama administration. They still did not give cancellations to people that were due or they were giving small amounts when they should’ve done all of it. You know, it was clear that the government is afraid to cancel the debt. Right? They’re just like, they’re afraid. And I don’t know exactly why. Because they know that, then it’s clear to us that the whole thing is, is the game. The whole thing is rigged. Or if they’re just so entrenched in, in ideas about like, you know, no, you took out these loans and this is the right thing to do. And you, you don’t have to follow through on your commitments, but for whatever reason, Democrats and Republicans alike are hostile to that cancellation and have been up until the last year.

So we’re really are in like all new territory. I’m in favor of, you know, really trying to push for full cancellation that covers everyone, including private loans, because I really think that’s the only solution moving forward because I think any kind of like partial cancellation for just certain segments of the population in a bad idea. I think it’s a terrible idea.

Nikki: Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you like really want to talk about?

Winter: Yeah. Saying earlier you know, black and Brown communities entering the college and that’s when Reagan and the, you know, the elite started, started instilling tuition. You know, it’s been like an amazing learning process for me as, as someone who is white, it’s been like a really powerful learning process to realize that. Debt actually has a really long history in communities of color and like a really long history of, of being a mechanism of control, you know? And that, that actually goes back to the founding of the country and like back to Haiti and like back to like, you know, the formation of nation-States, that that has always been a way that like land has been taken from, you know, indigenous folks that like slaves were, were, you know, Lives were controlled through, you know, that’s they owe to, to landowners and it’s, it’s a really long and old tradition in the United States.

And it’s new for a lot of white folks, but it’s actually like something that has been used for a really long time. Right. And that there’s a real deep racial component to this and that. I think that’s really important to lift up and to name and that it’s still happening today. Right? When you look at student loans and the you know, all, all sorts of consumer loans, there’s racial inequities in every single one of them. So it’s really, really important. I think we center that in all these conversations.

Yeah. Yeah. I have somebody who’s on the show. She’s coming on two episodes after you named Bri, who started something called The Prosp(a)rity Project, basically she’s fundraising and she’s doing retroactive debt payoff for black women. Yeah. So

do you mean? What do you mean retroactive?

Nikki: So, so they have the debt. And so she’s giving backward. She’s giving retroactive scholarships backward to

Winter: Oh, wow. That’s cool. That’s really cool. Wow. Yeah, I can’t wait I’m to definitely also that one. That’s cool.

Nikki: So what advice would you give to your younger self? Knowing what you know now

Winter: No, it’s crazy enough, but I wouldn’t do anything differently. Like I thought, you know, maybe I’d say like, don’t go to school. It’s not worth it, but. No, like, you know, the younger me deserve to go to school and there’s no other way. Besides student loans. I think I would just say, say to him, like, don’t worry about the debt.

I guess it’s, you’re going to join a movement later on in life. That’s going to get canceled. So don’t, don’t worry about it. Cause they’re there it’s it’s it should be free. And those numbers, they aren’t real. It’s not going to, it’s not going to it’ll it’ll cause you some stress, but, at the end of the day, People are going to win free education and debt cancelation. Don’t worry about it too much. So I had to say, relax, relax. Go to school. You want

Nikki: I love that. All right. Well, We’re coming to the end. Is there anything you want to pitch?

Winter: Yeah. I think that the, what we’re doing at the Debt Collective is really powerful, you know, trying to create this debtors’ union. And, I want to invite people to join us, to join the union and to see their debts, not as something that is , a personal failure and something that, they did wrong, but as something that needs to be reversed, like, you know, a policy failure that we can fight together against, and that we’re building power, you know, and we’re, we’re, there’s power in a union and we don’t have to go at it alone. And, throughout American history and global history is really what changes things is people coming together and taking action together. And so now is the time to do that around student loans, but also around all different types of loans. And so people can go to debtcollective.org, the union, where we’re building it out. You know, we’re building out ways for people to get involved inform locals and. You know, form different campaigns and get involved in the student network and we’re going to win.

So people should get involved so that they can feel empowered and celebrate us. And we get all the debt canceled that’s going to be, it’s going to be a really great time.

Nikki: Thank you so much for being here.

Winter: Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was really fun. And looking forward to all the wonderful guests and conversations you’re going to have, and I sent all my colleagues your way.

Nikki: Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio.

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault who writes the information and transcripts about each episode.

This podcast would not have been possible without them.

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

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