This week’s guest, Melissa Byrne, is back after her mini-episode to tell us more about her advocacy for debt cancellation and the latest news from Washington on the student debt crisis. With federal student loan interest currently paused, President Biden is currently considering a $50k forgiveness plan for all student debt holders however Byrne and others are pushing for All to be Canceled.

During this episode, Byrne recounts some of the policies that were put in place during the 80’s and 90’s that made the debt crisis what it is today, as well as what inspired her to take up the fight against an unjust system. In her early days in politics, after attending a talk with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Byrne said she learned to ditch the shame around her own student debt and use that energy to try and solve the debt crisis for all Americans.

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Transcript

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast!

Melissa Byrne: I am really glad to see you again.

Nikki Nolan: It is so good to see you. So since we’ve already talked, refresh us on how much student debt you have right now.

Melissa Byrne: I have over 30 grand and I’m in federal public debt. And I technically have, I think about 90 to a hundred of private loan debt. But that, that’s a little more complicated.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. And you can listen to the mini-episode where you talked about how you actually, they can’t even collect on it.

Melissa Byrne: They cannot. They were too afraid to sue me because of discovery, which tells you how bad the system is.

Nikki Nolan: What has been happening since we last talked on the mini-episode?

Melissa Byrne: A couple of things. One, Secretary Cardona was confirmed. So now we have an Education Secretary, which is a good thing.

And we’re almost at one year of the pause on collecting federal student loans. And the longer we go on the harder it is to restart it. Because I’m hearing from folks who are now being able to buy homes for the first time because of the pause.

People really like the pause. People really, really liked not having to pay back debt they shouldn’t have in the first place. All we did was have the audacity to say we deserve to go to college.

And we’ve had a little bit of a battle because there’s this woman who used to work for a really, really bad loan guarantor or who’s trying to become the head of the Federal Student Aid Department.

And it’s just like, yeah, no. You can’t, like, you can’t have spent a couple of years profiting from, like, terrible colleges and from a student loan guarantor, or, and then think that you can run the Federal Student Aid Administration. It’s just like, yeah, yeah.

Nikki Nolan: How likely do you think it is that she’ll be confirmed?

Melissa Byrne: Her arrogance of thinking that she could hire a PR person to help her run a kind of a mini-campaign is backfiring. Because people don’t really realize that student debtors are organized. And so I think to eight years ago, someone with her credentials- Rhode scholar comes from a wealthy family, does this kind of like, looks good on paperwork- would be a shoe-in. But we have a voice now. Debtors are like, no, you can’t have someone leading financial aid who doesn’t understand financial aid in the first place.

Nikki Nolan: Has anything sort of happened around canceling student debt?

Melissa Byrne: Did we talk before or after the Biden town hall?

Nikki Nolan: We talked before the Biden town hall. I think the Biden’s town hall was, like, right afterward.

Melissa Byrne: Okay. There, there was the, by the Biden town hall and, I love our president. I risked COVID to get them elected. So, throwing that out there.

A woman in Wisconsin asked him at this town hall that was held in Milwaukee if he would agree to warrant $50k of debt cancellation plan, which was a bad question to ask him because a president never makes policy announcements in the middle of a town hall format.

And he’s not going to jump ahead of where he currently is. It was really sad to watch because he just started going off on all of these tangents. And, you could tell all kinds of people are just, like, no, just quit talking, quit talking, quit talking.

But out of that, a couple of things that are historic in context is he did utter the word canceled student that and the $10k context, which we don’t support, but it’s still a president saying that we’re going to cancel debt. So that’s kinda cool. And then, he talked about free college for families making under $125k, which, you know. Also, like, we want full free college, but we’re negotiating.

So even though the answer was pretty terrible overall. Cause he just went into these tangents about private colleges versus public colleges and Ivys and all of these things that don’t actually reflect the current struggle in student loan debt. But the upside of his, the way he answered the question is that it animated everybody.

It’s actually put us in a stronger footing because if more people know that the public, they want student loan debt cancellation. And we want free college and zero interest rate loans going forward- which we can do because we’ve just demonstrated it for the last year. Like, we can have our loans paused. The government keeps functioning.

Nikki Nolan: That is a great point. When I read into some of the comments on the opposite side like, Oh, the taxpayers are going to have to pay this.

One, get out of this fight if you don’t have debt. This has nothing to do with you. Like, go away. And two, like, if you just look at some basic information. Taxpayers are not going to pay for this.

Melissa Byrne: I mean, they make- they make so much money off of it. And I mean, I’m learning a little bit more about the whole student loan asset product. SLABS

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. SLABS. Student loan asset-backed securities. I’m actually going to do a mini-episode completely on student loan asset-backed-

Melissa Byrne: Yeah. I mean, it’s absurd. When I was in seventh and eighth grade doing my work, being on a college track, starting high school. These folks, when I was 13, they were creating an asset for my future debt. So they could make money off my future debt. Cutting up and hacking up and selling different parts of my debt so they could make a profit and it’s just so absurd. It was just the people literally were celebrating student loans in the nineties.

Like, when Mere Attendants had to, when she withdrew her nomination, her name from consideration for OMB. One of the names that’s in consideration is Gene Sperling and he worked in the Clinton administration in the nineties.

So I Googled him on student debt. I watched a video of him from ’94 where him and the Deputy Education Secretary at the time, Madeline Kunin did an event celebrating the direct lending program and how it would make it easy to repay what you borrow. And the Deputy Ed Secretary didn’t seem to be buying the talking points.

And then I had just ended up going down this whole, C-SPAN has everything because of algorithms, underneath that video on the C-SPAN page where, like, other student debt videos from the nineties. And so then I clicked on them on with Bill Clinton and it was a rally, a rally at Southern Illinois University, where they were celebrating the expansion of student loans. And Dick Durbin was there. It was a cheerful, exciting event where they were celebrating how student loans would open up the door to education.

And looking back, the amount of people that have gotten bachelor’s degrees from that time to now has actually increased about 17%. So, like, it did increase the amount of people that got bachelor’s and got in the door to college. But people who did that ended up giving up the economic potential of those degrees. And it really just seems, like, because of Reaganomics, because of Newt Gingrich and all of those jerks, that the only thing that they were willing to fight for on the Dem side were loans. That’s the only thing they could win is, like, more money for lending.

And then that just started getting bad in the late nineties. I joke around that I’m, like, patient zero for this, cause I started college in the fall of ’97, and then Sally Mae’s privatization started in ’96, which I didn’t know. And that privatization was completed in 2004 if I recall correctly. And by 2004, ’05, ’06 is when it just really started to explode. And then you hit the financial collapse. It’s just been on this, like, horrible, upward trajectory.
And I was also shocked in this reading that groups like PIRG were actually supportive of loans and we’re, like, fighting to make lending better. And I’m just like, okay, well, at least now we have everybody fighting for cancellation. So there’s that.

Nikki Nolan: Who’s PIRG. I don’t, I don’t know about PIRG.

Melissa Byrne: PIRG is the public interest research group. So it’s one of the legacy grassroots organizations. You might’ve had them come to your door at some point in your life. They knock on doors. They raise money at the door. And I believe if I, that Ralph Nader was involved in the founding of them forever ago.
And, and they have a really big policy shop in DC that pushes policy.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, that’s cool. Thank you for educating me. I always, I mean, every time we talk, I learned a little bit more, which is the point of the show. To learn. And to cancel student debt.

Melissa Byrne: We are going to cancel it.
Like, this isn’t something- this isn’t, like, physics. Like these aren’t, like, immutable laws of nature that just are there and you have to deal with. These are all choices upon choices, upon choices, upon choices. Like we have tuition because we’ve chosen that your parental income should dictate your future.

Nikki Nolan: Do you know when that, sort of, started happening

Melissa Byrne: What happened is that, originally, education was for the elite in the US and then there was a big push with the GI bill that really opened up college to the masses. And then you had the sixties, when more and more people from working-class backgrounds went to college and you saw all of this great social change happening.
And then in the seventies you had a lot of folks that really resented that. And they started figuring out like, well, if we have tuition, if we have these barriers, then maybe that can control and minimize social justice change from happening and racial justice. Because people wanted- like these folks in power wanted to keep colleges wealthy and white to preserve their social power and their social standing.

So that’s when you see the changes that they UCs. You see the changes at the CUNYs. And then it just gets worse and worse. And then it’s just, like, lending, lending, lending. And, you know, even the debates, like, I was reading as I was down there reading all about Gene Sperling.

I read an article from the New York Times from ’88 about the policy that he wrote for Mike Dukakis’ education plan for higher education. And that’s actually one of the first presidential elections I really remember. And his plan was basically an income-share plan where a percentage of your income is to pay back this fee for a set amount of time.
So it was just fascinating just to see a bunch of bad people in the seventies completely derail our great society.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. And. You sorta touched on this, but a lot of this, you know, problem is racial justice issue. White supremacy is underlying a lot of the reason why we got here. Like pull and pull and pull, and then at the bottom of like, most of our problems is white supremacy.

I’m not surprised, but it’s also really frustrating.

Melissa Byrne: Yeah, it’s definitely- it’s definitely a mess and it’s sad. And it’s, you know, it’s created, like, real harm. It’s people who, because they didn’t have the ability to handle the dad or have people that could co-sign or parents that could do Plus Loans who chose not to go to college. You have people that chose not to go to the right college for them. So they end up at a college that doesn’t have their field of study. It doesn’t have the right kind of environment for them to really Excel in. You have all of these other choices impacted. Because of a great choice that was made to, you know, limit who could go to college and how they could go, and then just put up, like, more and more hurdles for people to climb over.

And then you’re basically, you have to take the most amount of risk in order to do what someone who says his parent is a venture capitalist doesn’t have to do it. Doesn’t even have to worry about.

Nikki Nolan: I want to talk about one thing you said, which is, the Parent Plus Loan. I talked to somebody whose parents didn’t even know they took out the Parent Plus Loans until their tax returns were being withheld and they, you know, were like, why are my tax returns being withheld? And they found out that they had a Parent Plus Loan. They didn’t even know. Do you know any information about…

Melissa Byrne: Oh my I mean parents. Yeah. It’s it’s one of the products. So, you know, wealthy families, they’re able to use a 529 plan where they sack away money and they get a tax credit and it’s, like, a very advantaged way to save. And then their kids get to- you pay for their kid’s college or grandchildren through this program and the kids get the money tax-free. So it’s a shelter between generations within a family.

Plus Loans are for the parents who didn’t have the ability to save for college, but they have, like, you know, decent credit. So they can afford- you know, they meet the credit requirements. And then they take out the loans in their name.

For their kids’ college education and they’re at, you know, high-interest rates. And nobody really talks about them when we talk about cancellation. And the people that are taking out the Plus Loans are, like, in their fifties, and sixties. So they’re nearing retirement age when.

They should really be taking that six-, $700, a thousand dollars a month that they’re putting into paying back these Plus Loans into, you know, their retirement. Paying off mortgages. You know, like, just getting them set up for retirement. And this is where you’re starting to see the garnishment to social security benefits going sky high. Because they hit, they end up defaulted. They had social security age and then their social security benefits get garnished.

The Treasury Secretary has the authority to send the letter stating that garnishing social security benefits goes against the purpose of the program. And that purpose of social security program is to keep seniors out of poverty, and thus taking away their income from their monthly benefit is against the program. So they can choose to exempt them.

The garnishing social security benefits came about in, I believe it was the 1996 omnibus legislation, that was used. And it was just kind of, again, it’s just this, like, the nineties were just terrible, terrible. Like, I don’t know if anything good policy-wise came out of the nineties. It was just that it was just this horrible, horrible class of Republican electeds, and then Democrats that were just petrified.

And I think people try to do their best in that terrible, terrible scenario. And, like, at first it was basically nobody facing garnishment and, but, it became a perfect storm the farther out that you got from the origination of these lending programs. So by the time you had the Obama years and you had the fiscal crisis, the garnishments start going up and up and up and… we were trying to get it done through EO. We had one Senator who just wanted to do it through legislation, and I’m just, like, that bill is never going to get passed because have you seen Congress? And then I think it was, like, the week after Obama left office, the New York Times did an editorial on the need to end the garnishment.

And I’m just like, yeah, your timing.

Nikki Nolan: horrible timing. Oh my god.

Melissa Byrne: No, and people were like, well, if we do it as an EO Trump, or somebody could just undo. And I’m like, that’s fine, let them take the political hit for undoing it. At least, like, it’s just- sometimes people just are really petrified about doing the right thing.

Right now I’m garnishments are paused because of the pause, and hopefully, Janet Yellen can be convinced to sign the piece of paper that exempts them from garnishment.

Nikki Nolan: Okay. So Yellen’s the one we need to target to, to have that written out.

Melissa Byrne: Yeah on that one, just to, like,stop the garnishments. Cause there’s just no need for them.

Nikki Nolan: It’s so unfair. First of all, social security used to actually not even be taxed. Like we already taxed to get social security, you know, pulling out social security shouldn’t be taxed. But again, the great old Ronald Reagan introduced, like, taxation into social security. That man did so many bad things for education and poor and working class people. And it’s just, like, every new piece of information I find is just, is so frustrating. It’s just so frustrating.

Melissa Byrne: It’s all frustrating and terrible.

Nikki Nolan: but it goes to show how easy it is that bad decisions that are made even semi-recently or long ago can snowball into these terrible, terrible effects long-term. People just need to be more thoughtful and be less racist.

Melissa Byrne: Yes. All of those things. I think for me, it’s thinking about the policy. With this wanting to make college free. I’m thinking about the fourth grader right now. Like what are we setting them up to walk into in eight years? And so if we get the free college, they’ll know that they can work through middle school and high school.

And knowing that all they have to do is have the grades to get in somewhere. And that’s all they have to worry about. And they don’t have to worry about money. They don’t have to worry about being, you know, all of that.
Hopefully we’re going to be coming back here with, we had some interviews. I want to ask somebody who was working in the Clinton administration, the nineties, like, what were you- like what, what was your thought process when you were thinking about loans? Like, were you thinking of, like, the four year old or the fourth grader? You’re thinking of the eighth grader like I was. And the loans that they would take out to get to college.

What, was your concern more just to get folks in the door and then deal with it later? What how were the impacts being thought? And just to understand, because some of these folks are still in government and still working in politics. And so this project to cancel student debt is actually undoing people’s work. And people are really proud of their work.

And my thought is that people from the early nineties to them student loans were the only way they’d be able to get folks in the door to college. And so they probably think of themselves as, like,we moved heaven and earth just to get people in the door.

And they probably don’t think of themselves as folks that were walking folks into another crisis. And so I want to figure out how they think about it. So then we can turn them into champions for this.

Nikki Nolan: I’m so excited about this. We are going to get this going, hopefully by spring summer, we’ll have those interviews.

Melissa Byrne: Yeah, no, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. And I think that it’s also like, how do we preserve this history? And I kind of want to look at like, who are some of the New York Times- who is the New York Times writer for education in the eighties and the nineties to be like, they were covering all of this.

Like, what are their thoughts having covered that if they’re still around. To this, like, what does, you know, kind of getting that angle, finding the staffers. Like I’m trying to get ahold of Ivan, who was the public- who ran the public higher education program for PIRG to be like, you were front row to all of this. What’s your thoughts? And what can we learn today from what you did in the nineties? How do we take that?

Nikki Nolan: I love it. It’s it’s okay. I think the more that we learn and the more that we know, the better we will be set up for the future. Because there was that new, there was a new study that just came out, because everything is becoming too expensive, people are not having children.

And this is one of the aspects, you know, having a ton of student debt and also thinking about your child’s future of how are you even going to pay for them to go to school and how are they going to ever get out of debt is impacting us on a societal level. It’s it’s just, I can’t wait to get some clarity in there

Melissa Byrne: Totally. It impacts all of these areas and I don’t think any of that was thought through. And I think that we just let that Ayn Rands and the Reagans run wild. It’s like people lost an election in 1980 and just lost their spirit and lost their spunk. And then, folks just really bought into this like, Oh, we’ve gotta be bi-partisan to solve things. When it’s like, no, no, no, no. Republicans are- they cause problems. And like, you don’t have to collaborate with people that cause problems. You have to build up popular support for your ideas. None of the Republicans are going to vote for the American rescue plan that the Biden administration is behind. But actually 80% of Americans support it.

So that’s what matters. That’s what it means to have unity. Like, unity, isn’t this let’s have two Republicans and two Democrats and let’s hold hands and be like, see, we’re United and we’re together, but really, no. What’s unity is when you have the majority of the people like, really on board.

So for student debt, the majority of the public supports cancellation. Great. It’s a unified project. It’s popular, so we can do this.

Nikki Nolan: So we’ve talked a lot about some of the things that are happening with society, some of the decisions that went into that, and you’ve talked a little bit about your early life, but I would love to know a little bit more about your story. I’d love you to walk me through, you as a child through where you are now and sort of impacts that changed your path.

Melissa Byrne: I was always aware of things about justice and injustice. And I was always drawn to the fight in different ways. But I always thought that would manifest in like, going into like, medicine.

Nikki Nolan: Hmm.

Melissa Byrne: When you’re little it’s like, go be a doctor or be a lawyer- like those things.
And then the more that I learned about the environment, the more that I learned about international policy and- like my first semester in college, I was handed a flyer about the School of the Americas, which is this program that was housed at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained military leaders from Latin America on US soil.

And then they just happened to go back to Latin America and commit crimes against humanity. Like Pinochet was a graduate. The folks linked to the murders of the Jesuit priest, Oscar Romero and to the attacks and the nuns.
And a few weeks later, I hopped in a van with eight people and we drove down to Georgia from Philadelphia and was part of this huge protest at the base. And that really got me into really thinking about foreign policy and how we interact with each other and how power plays out. And it was also the point where, one of the points that I realized that yes, I grew up Democrat, but Democrat doesn’t always equal good. That there’s like, it gets complicated.

So then I ended up interning in Congress that summer as a 19-year-old for Joe Kennedy. The second. The one who’s his son who was just recently in Congress. So this in ’98. So it was, like, really cool to be like a first-generation college student interning in a Kennedy’s office on this specific policy.

And it really opened my eyes. And it was during that process that the LA that was working on banking, kept talking about all of these mergers and how we’re going to all be screwed over. And that everything was just terrible. And I just remember, like every year, my, at that time, my bank was changing because they kept getting bought out by other banks.

So it’s like, living through this part of what would be the financial collapse 10 years later. So those were like, kind of, like, moments. And then, like, the Iraq, I was organizing against the Iraq war. Organizing around stopping sweat shops. And that just led me to like, understanding that you also have to get folks elected to office.
So then I would do this, like, work on elections, work on advocacy, work on elections, work on advocacy and kind of going in and out and, like, weaving, weaving this path. And that has really been a big part of it. But that was always fighting for other people. And it wasn’t until I think I told this story last time.

It wasn’t until it all caught up, when I was then caught out on my debt and I realized that I needed to take all these skills that I have learned in all this organizing work to fight, to make college free and cancel student loan debt. And so it all is kind of, it all came together in that moment about 10 years ago.

And I think if, like, 10 years ago I would have been like, I would still be thinking about this in 10 years that have been like, Oh, I’m not going to do that. Like, that’s absurd. So I’m really glad that I didn’t actually think through the totality of this project and, like, what it means to fundamentally shift how power works in the United States.
‘Cause I think that’s really an overwhelming topic. But we’ve gotten there. More of my people are speaking up about it. They’re talking about it and. We’re going to get to the place where the former Senator from the great banking state of Delaware is going to be the one that canceled student loan debt.

Nikki Nolan: Actually you sorta touched on it in the mini-episode about that. That thing that happened, where somebody got called out, but you actually didn’t say the story. And you said you were going to tell it on this episode. So tell more about that story

Melissa Byrne: I would love- okay. So I was working for Social Security Works, which is a project to expand social security benefits. And during that time in 2010, there was a big effort through this thing called the fiscal commission that are Skin Bowels, and, like, Alan Simpson were a part of that. What they wanted to do was proposed cuts to social security benefits through raising the retirement age and other, other mechanisms.

So I was working to stop that. And this was, you know, when we still had a lot of like, super-moderate Democrats in the Senate. They just, I don’t know what inspired them and why they for office. And then I had to go with my boss to this meeting that happened before the workday at the AFL with other people from other organizations to kind of, like, talk through what other things were happening.

And we had a featured speaker at this, at this meeting. And he’s giving his talk and then he asked people to raise their hand if they had student loan debt. I was the only one in the room that had the debt. I was the youngest in the room at the time. And he’s like, well, how much debt do you have? And I’m like, I’m not telling.

And he’s like, without skipping a beat, well, as long as you’re ashamed of your debt, the banks have all the power. And I was like, Oh. And then he asked me again and I said half the amount. And in that process, I realized, Oh, it’s not my fault I have student loan debt. I should solve this problem then if it’s not my fault. And the person who did this was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Y’all might’ve heard of him. So he’s a really good organizer. So when student debt is canceled, we can thank him.

And yes, I left that room and figure it out slowly and surely. Different versus talking about it and thinking about it and having different iterations of, like, what the idea, solution is. And. That led me four and a half years later to work for Bernie Sanders for President.

And then to go back again in 2019. And now here we are, where we have a president who’s committed to canceling student loan debt. So now we’re just passionately fighting slash negotiating over the amount. So this is a much better place to be in and fighting to make college free.

Nikki Nolan: Well, we’re getting really close to the end. So is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you want to add?

Melissa Byrne: One thing that hasn’t been asked is how do we win? And we win by folks getting involved. And so I think it’s really important that if you’re listening and if you have student loan debt, join the work to cancel student loan debt. If you don’t have student loan debt, join the work to cancel student loan debt and be a good ally.

And so there’s a role for you. And I think that everything from, you know, saving (202) 224-3121, again, (202) 224-3121, which is the number for Congress. So every day you can call a different Senator and tell them to cancel student loan debt. To hooking up with one of the great organizations like Strike Debt and Student Debt Crisis. If you’re a part of a labor union, talk to your labor union. Like everybody’s doing work along this, you can follow me on Twitter at MC B Y R N E, and say tuned for some things that I might be launching in the next coming weeks. But basically say that you want this to happen and show up when you’re asked to help out.

Nikki Nolan: Well, we’ve sort of come to the end and I was going to ask if you had any advice that you would give to your younger self knowing all of this rich knowledge that you know now.
Melissa Byrne: I think I would- what I would say is that just like, from the moment you sign on the line, just to own the debt. And just be obnoxious about it. And just be like, I’m doing this. And I’m doing this because, like, other people have failed. And, like, my debt as a sign of, like, society’s failures. And then just from there, demand that it be canceled.

Nikki Nolan: Is there anything else that you want to promote besides what you just

Melissa Byrne: I mean, I wish I had a SoundCloud, but I’m a terrible singer. I think I would also just like- this is in all of our interest. If you haven’t gotten a vaccination yet, go online and find out when you’re going to be eligible in your local community, and please make sure you get your vaccines. So that way we can all have events in person, again, like big rallies to cancel student loan debt. And you should make sure 10 of your friends get their vaccines because we are living in crisis, upon crisis, upon crisis.
So let’s, let’s all get vaccinated, and then we can cancel the student debt.

Nikki Nolan: I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Melissa Byrne: I had so much fun and I can’t wait to be back on. We’re both interviewing cool people. It’s going to be awesome.

Nikki Nolan: 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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