As an NYU Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Andrew Ross sees firsthand the way student debt negatively impacts the lives of his students. His students and experience as an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement led Andrew to launch the Occupy Student Debt campaign which eventually became the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective is a debtors’ union fighting to cancel all types of debt and currently organized the Biden Jubilee 100, putting pressure on President Biden to enact his executive power and cancel federal student debt.

In this episode, Andrew takes Nikki through the history of the student debt crisis and explains how it is intrinsically linked to racial disparity and the political activism of young people. He also defines many terms that inform the work of the Debt Collective including jubilee, revolver, and the debt trap. Andrew shares the Debt Collective’s proof of concept in a rolling jubilee and debt abolition that emphasizes the need for a national debtors’ union and the importance of collective action. Andrew is also the author of Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal.

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Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast. It is so good to have you here today.

So, to start, I would love to know what got you so interested in student debt?

Andrew Ross: I’m a professor and, I’ve been a professor for a long time at very expensive universities, especially at NYU where I’ve been teaching for the last, I don’t know, 26 years or so. And NYU is, used to be the poster child for student debt still is in a lot of people’s minds.

I don’t know if we’re still up there as number one, it’s difficult to really estimate these things, but, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of students that take on a shitload of debt to attend and why you, and, be very conscious of that in my, in my classes for a long time, began to ask students about it.

Since they’re not very forthcoming about it for all sorts of reasons, cause it’s very stigmatizing. And, and there’s a lot of shame attached to having large amounts of debt. If you’re in the same class, as students who have none and whose families are, are affluent enough to be able to pay their way through college.

So, and NYU just happens to be one of those places where there often are classes like that. There’s not a lot of financial aid here. And so we do have these disparities, crushing disparity. So it’s, you know, it’s a short answer is, is that the elephant in the room. It’s in my class, it’s in my classroom every day.

And I, I, I couldn’t avoid it after a certain point. That’s how I got involved with the debt resistance movement.

Nikki Nolan: How do you consciously reconcile being a professor at one of these schools that is like indebting students.

Andrew Ross: Well, I, I mean, I was able to do it by, by getting involved as a, as a debt activist myself. And, and, and that involves off-campus and on-campus activity. But I have to say, although, although some of the, some of these private universities tend to be the extremes in terms of the generation of debt.

There’s not such a big gap anymore between the private and public universities. I mean, tuition costs have shot up, but public universities much more, rapidly and disproportionately than a private universities. And maybe we’ll get to that. That’s one of the big causes of the problem here. So, there’s, there’s less of a difference than there used to be.

That doesn’t, that doesn’t mean that I, I sleep any better. But, but so that’s what propelled me into the movement really, not to appease my conscience, but because I’m in a position to be able to do a few things about it, that students are not.

Nikki Nolan: How did we get into the student debt crisis?

Andrew Ross: Well there’s a lot of factors involved, but you know, the biggest one obviously is, is withdrawal of, of, government support for, for college education that it used to be funding our public universities used to be a much higher priority, political priority in this country. And, and you know, from state to state, there’s an uneven landscape, but nonetheless from state to state we’ve seen a fairly steady and in some cases, rapid withdrawal of support and, and correspondingly naturally a rising curve, of student debt generation over the period of maybe the last 30, 35 years or so.

Public colleges used to be relatively inexpensive in a lot of states and in some cases almost free. And, obviously that’s, that’s no longer the case, so it’s, it’s less of a political priority. And, you, so you can’t blame it entirely on Wall Street because there was a period when, you know, Wall Street banks got very interested in, in, in lending and student lending but, most, most student debt these days is not private, you know, private bank that it’s, it’s it’s government debt, and, that’s not to say the government doesn’t profit in a way that Wall Street profits, the government does profit.

And it’s sometimes difficult for people to get their heads around that. Government profiting off something like the cost of education, but there are billions of dollars, profit every year from the lending program. There’s no reason why the federal government has to make money out of this, but they do.

And there’s no, there’s no evidence that the profits are applied back into education.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, I think you said in your book, it goes into military spending and, and other things. It’s not a circular cycle in terms of like where the profits go to, which is, is so wild.

I listened to one of your interviews, you talked about sort of Reagan, and what he did as the governor to the California institutions and institutionalizing tuition to get people who were rising up or protesting against government injustices and so he used tuition as a political mechanism. Can you talk more about that?

Andrew Ross: Well, that, that was fairly clear at the time. And, I don’t think people really expected it to be as consequential as it has become. But, that was, you know, Reagan’s response to student activism at Berkeley and other California campuses when he was governor. And he, he made it quite clear that, that this, this was one of his response is start raising, you know, tuition fees and, just make it more difficult, for the optional political imagination of students to be exercised, you know, during the time that they were enrolled.

And, in the time since then, I think we, you know, we’ve seen the consequences. I’m very much aware of my students doing, you know, two jobs, sometimes three jobs, to stave off going further into debt. The pressure and the anxiety that comes with that, the fatigue that comes with that, it’s not just their academic work that suffers people falling asleep in class that happens.

But also it, it just limits the amount of, surplus time, disposable time you have available to, to be politically active, which is, you know, you, you, you, you scratch scratch the surface of educators like me and ask them, what was the purpose of education. Then we’ll say, you know, to produce, active citizens, to train people how to be active citizens.

That’s that’s, that would be my answer. And there’s so much more difficult to do when you have a, such a heavy debt load on your shoulders. And when you’re working, you know, two or three jobs just to, to keep the Wolf from the door.

Nikki Nolan: It’s sort of like a Cobra fact, it’s like incentivizing people to have more debt because then they won’t uprise. And so, like, it almost seems like a creditor’s dream. Like this is so much the situation that we’re in right now just seems the perfect storm of empowering the creditor class and really, pushing down the debtor class.

What, what is the creditor class?

Andrew Ross: Creditor class is, is, is bigger than it used to be, because financial activity and income generated from finances, is a much bigger chunk of our, GDP than, than it used to be. And in fact, you know, economists will tell us that, you know, the majority of, of the income generated in, in the last 20 years or so, you know, by the so-called 1% comes from unearned income, derived in one fashion or another from financial activity.

So creditor class is not, is not, it’s not simply, you know, confined to people who actually lend money. It’s a much bigger group of people who profit, who generate income from financial activity that is dependent on credit. And, and, and that can include a much, a much larger slice of the population of course. It’s a very old story though. The one that you’re evoking about how the imposition of debt can be used as a form of social control and dispossession. You look at the history of mortgages for example. There’s been a lot of very good scholarship done recently on how, mortgages where, mortgage foreclosures were pretty much invented in this country, in the colonial period as a way of dispossessing indigenous people of their land.

Credit would be extended. And, when, when it wasn’t paid back because a lot of indigenous borrowers were not fully aware that conditions of how to pay back, loans, then, then a creditor would be able to, you know, seize the land. And, and so debtt, and dispossession are, are tied together from the origins of settler colonialism in this country.

And it’s, it, the, at the macro level, that’s a very long story, but it’s still, is, is still a fundamental principle, I would say.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. What has sort of been the impact of student debt as you see it?

Andrew Ross: At this point, you can see the impact because demographically, the share of the, of the debt burden is increasingly, shifting towards, more elderly populations. And it’s certainly no longer the case that, the student debtt doesn’t have an impact on people who are 60 or over whether it’s their own student debt or whether it’s their children’s debt or even their grandchildren, because, people have that in that age bracket increasingly are asked to co-sign debt loans.

So they’re on the hook at a much, at a much more advanced age. And, and we, and we’ve seen that demographic shifting over the years. So, I there’s, there’s not any, I mean, obviously it’s uneven. Student debt has, has a much greater impact. The burden of it is a much greater impact on low-income households and also minority households disproportionately.

The racial wealth gap in this country is magnified by student debt. That the data’s pretty clear on that. But it also means that, you know, this is a consumer society. We it’s a consumer capitalist economy. And when you place such a high burden on, on consumers, in terms of debt service, then it, it does really reduce the disposable income.

So we’ve seen a generation or two, of college graduates now who, who have not entered the housing market. The, the renters. And there, you know, Generation Rent, and also, unable really to afford a big ticket consumer items, or have to go more deeply into debt in order to afford these. So, there’s a kind of domino effect.

If you are from the get, go after graduation, if you’re trying to service your student debts, then that’s going to have an impact on all of your spending, your disposable spending power and, and the degree to which a consumer capitalist economy maintains itself. It’s sort of, you know, that’s why the federal reserve gets very concerned about student debt.

Nikki Nolan: Hmm.

Andrew Ross: Cause they, their job is to keep, consumer capitalism ticking along and, they, their job is not simply to enrich the creditor class. They have to do all these things at the same time. And it’s a, it’s, it’s a tough job for them. My heart doesn’t go out to them. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not a big fan of not a big fan of consumer capitalism and just trying to see it from their perspective.

Nikki Nolan: What do you think can be done about student debt and how can we make sort of like higher education, like a more just system.

Andrew Ross: It’s very simple. The US is an outlier on this landscape. There’s nowhere else in the world where, you know, where, where, where students go heavily into debt in order to pursue higher education. As we know as many industrialized countries where college education is tuition free, none of them are as affluent as a US.

Know, you can go south of the border to Mexico. Colleges are free. It’s not, it’s not that the US can’t afford to do this, these, their political choices and, and a question of, of priorities.

I am actually from Scotland, and I went to University in Scotland where colleges are tuition free.

They still are. So I’ve never had any student debt, and, that’s a country in which, is very strong, popular support to this day for the principle of free college education. And, I think, you know, there was, there was strong public, public popular support at one time in the US and during, during Cold War period, when education was relatively affordable.

But the big difference was most of the people that benefited from Cold War programs like the GI Bill and, and fairly generous public funding of universities were white. And, so it was a very exclusive access to the system at that time. You can make a very strong argument that, when, minority households began to enter, the higher education system, that’s when the problems began because that’s when states started withdrawing money and there was less popular majority-white popular support for funding colleges.

So, you know, the answer to that question is heavily racialized. You really have to look at, look at it from a racialized perspective. The big prompt. One of the big promises of the Civil Rights movement was to, you know, that, the doors of higher education be opened to black students, who would have the right to attend colleges.

And if you look at the evidence over the last 30 or 40 years, the right to access education has been replaced by the right to access education loans, which is a completely different thing altogether.

But just to go back to your question, we do have College for All legislation, that has been introduced in Congress. For the last several years and most recently, you know, by Bernie Sanders in the Senate.

And, and by Pramila Jayapal and in, in the House, it’s very strong, there’s both very strong bills. In the Debt Collective, we had some input on those bills and, they are, are, you know, it’s perfectly reasonable legislation.

Um, I support them and that’s, that’s the way they should be. Of course, we’ve always insisted that debt abolition has to, has to go forward at the same time as a tuition free college.

So, these have been the two most abiding demands of our movement.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. So I feel like we should talk a little bit about the debt jubilee, which was one of your, was it one of your first debt actions or it was a debt action you were closely related to? I don’t think that everyone understands what a jubilee is so if you could explain like the jubilee.

Andrew Ross: The jubilee is a very ancient concept. It’s biblical it’s in the Bible, and it was practice, the practice of you know, abolishing all debts and wiping the debt. Wiping the slate clean was, was a practice and, and, you know, antiquity ancient societies where a new dynasty or a new ruler would come to power and decide to wipe out all the debt. So the debt slaves would be returned to their families. And, and you start from scratch again. It was a way of restoring the balance of power, typically in a society where the creditor classes had become too powerful. The government class, the political class has to do something to restore the balance of power in its favor.

So it’s a very old concept. And it’s, in this country, of course, emancipation was, was often framed as a, as an act of jubilee. It’s an abolition, strictly speaking, abolition of private property. And, in terms of, in financial terms, we decided to you know, restore, revive, the concept, following the international debt jubilee movements of the, of the late 20th century, there was a concerted effort to try and abolish the external debts of a lot of global South countries that have fallen into the debt trap. And so the Jubilees South Movement was, an initiative we took a lot of inspiration from, and, and when I say we I’m really referring to, you know, I group of us who met at Occupy Wall Street in the early, you know, the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street and decided to, to launch the Occupy Student Debt campaign, which was a very ambitious campaign that was focused on student debt.

It was a crazy idea at the time we, we thought we should try and get 1 million people to sign on. And agreed to refuse to pay their debts. Once we’d reached the 1 million signature level and we didn’t really have the resources, to launch and run a national campaign, but it was Occupy, everyone thought anything was possible. It was very heady, and everything was viral. And so we went ahead with it and it was, it was a very interesting campaign. We got nowhere near our 1 million signatures. But we learned a lot about student debt we raised the, the, I think we raised the national consciousness about student debt and doing the campaign, and, we also learned about a lot about the psychology of debtors, which has been very important to our work ever since. The campaign, I mean, ultimately the campaign failed, but the irony is that 1 million student debtors actually defaulted that year. The difference is that they didn’t, they didn’t fall together as we intended.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Andrew Ross: They felt they, they felt it individually. So there was no impact if they had defaulted together, then we would be having a different conversation today.

So that, that was the story of that campaign. I can tell you the story of what happened after that, which did involve the jubilee more directly.

Nikki Nolan: I would love to learn more about that.

Andrew Ross: I’d have to tell you this story about Strike Debt first because the rolling jubilee was off shoot of Strike Debt and Strike Debt was what succeeded the Occupy sit in that campaign. A lot of Occupy groups had disbanded, largely as a result of, police suppression.

There’s a real story about Occupy that the nationally coordinated effort by police departments, put paid to occupy in most cities in the US. But a year later, some of the remnants, of groups along with the, our group from the Occupy Student Debt campaign formed Strike Debt. And it was, it was a, it was a formation that wasn’t exclusively about student debt.

We were supposed to look at all, all household debt classes, housing, medical debt, credit card, debt, student debt, so on and so forth. Because in our analysis you really had to look not a single debt classes, but the household as, as the basic unit, because all of these debts flow through a single household.

And so they’re interdependent and they’re interconnected. So it’s a little artificial really just to focus on one particular kind of debt like student debt.

One of our projects was called, “the rolling jubilee” and, it was a mutual aid project, which was one of the central principles of Occupy culture, people helping each other, in a cooperative fashion.

And so the idea behind rolling jubilee was that we discovered, and a lot of us didn’t know this, that, there are many different types of debt that are when they don’t perform well for creditors, the creditors sell these debts on the secondary debt market at a drastically reduced price, sometimes as little as, you know, 5 cents on the dollar, and then debt collectors buy those debts and then try and collect the amount.

So when the debt collectors calling you up to harass you on the phone, they have only paid a very small amount of money for your debt. And they’re trying to collect on the full amount. Most people don’t know that, right? We didn’t know that, but that’s the reality of that’s how the secondary debt market functions.

So we thought it would be interesting just to shine a light on this and really rolling jubilee was a project of, public education or political education that we would try and raise some money and buy some debt on the secondary debt market and just abolish it, not collect it. So, we, we thought we could maybe raise $50,000 and, because the ratio we were told was 5 cents on the dollar.

We’d maybe wipe out a million dollars worth of debt and make a big hullabaloo about it and get some publicity and call attention to it. And it, it was very successful. So we raised a lot more money suddenly like $750,000. And, so we, you know, we, we selected particular portfolios of debt, mostly medical debt initially, and wiped those out.

And, in the end, I think it was about $33 million, in total. So we got a lot better ratio than 5 cents on the dollar for some of the debt buys. But people love this project if only because, you know, shows that debt could be abolished, and they loved the idea of it is it was a lot of goodwill attached to it.

And for people who are off the hook, obviously, they felt this burden off their backs. And, that nonetheless, it’s a drop in the ocean. I mean, $33 million just. For us it was proof of concept what we call proof of concept that collective action can produce results and you can, you can, though, this popular, popular empowerment mechanism actually make the debt go away and abolish it.

And for people that was a very, powerful message in a way to send.

Nikki Nolan: Okay. What’s happened since then?

Andrew Ross: Well, we stopped the rolling jubilee because it was not intended to be our life’s work. It’s not, it’s not a very pleasant place to be the secondary debt market is full of bottom feeders. I mean some of the scummiest people in the world, as you can imagine, trying to exploit, trying to exploit this situation.

So we didn’t want to stay there for very long and we didn’t intend to stay there for that long. So after a year we wound it up, we are actually going to be reviving, the rolling jubilee idea quite soon, in the Debt Collective. Can’t say much more about it than that using the same mechanism, but under a different name and for different purposes.

But we’re, we’re going to be doing that in the next several months or so I think. But so, Strike Debt also, wound down after a while, after about a year or so. And, you know, for all sorts of reasons and the group that was left, the remnant that was left, decided to start again under a different name.

We called it the Debt Collective. We decided to refocus on student debt. And, we decided to start small rather than, you know, go for a million signatures from the top down. And we decided to start from the bottom up and grow from, from a relatively small number of debtors. So we found some students who were, who had been scammed in the for-profit college system and the Corinthian college system.

And they had been, you know, royally, scammed. They, they had nothing to show for their, their education. And they were left holding a big bag of debt. They were very angry. They didn’t know how they didn’t know what to do about it, and they didn’t know how to organize. And so we were able to come with some resources, some of the knowledge that we gathered about debt, legal resources, publicity.

And so we helped them organize the first debt strike, which is a Corinthian Debt Strike. I think it was 2014.

And, that was a strike against, the federal debt. And, it was successful because we found a loophole in the Higher Education Act, which allowed students to file for a discharge of their federal debt, if they could show that they had been, you know, exploited or scammed in some way. And that debt had been generated under false pretense.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. Called Borrowers Defense.

Andrew Ross: Yes, the Borrower’s Defense. And, so ultimately there were several thousands of these, Borrower Defense petitions filed and, the Department of Education recognized it was on the hook for this and, and acknowledged they would have to pay out. And then,

Nikki Nolan: They didn’t, they ended up like saying they were going to pay out and only they were like, okay, we’ll forgive 10% or something like that. I had someone on my previous show who was a part of the first approved batch and under Betsy DeVos, they were like, we know you were scammed, but you still have to pay 90% of the scammed money.

And with new Secretary Cardona and Biden, they, they, 72,000 people are going to have their loans forgiven, which is like over a billion dollars. But like, I can imagine going down that road and having it say that you’re approved. And then all of a sudden, they’re like, well, you still have to pay 90% of it.

Or some kind of like fractional mathematical equation that they like, Oh my God. I know I was just shaking your head.

Andrew Ross: Very frustrating. Very frustrating. I don’t think, I mean, legally, I don’t think that the, the payout was ever, ever in doubt, but the, the ability of the Department of Education and the Trump Administration under Betsy DeVos to, you know, to distract and, and to prevaricate and to put obstacles in the path of the payoff and basically just deny the obligation to pay out was, you know, is considerable obviously.

But, ultimately I think we, you know, we, we did, we did expect to see justice done and it, it, it does look as if justice will be done, how far that a door can be prised, open, remains to be seen. You know, for, for a lot of folks and the definition of what is fraudulent, the circumstances under which you can claim a discharge.

What defines fraudulence and, and what falls outside of fraudulent activity is, still open to question. I think in my mind.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, I know a bunch of people who are stuck inside of it. Like I have a friend that I filled out all her paperwork in 2017 and she’s just been in a holding loop. And my last guest Drew, like had a fraudulent company fill out his Borrower’s Defense and he paid them like $2,000 dollars to fill it out.

And the Debt Collective’s like “they’re a scam!” and I’m like, this poor kid has been scammed so many. He went to two scam colleges, then got scammed in a refinance and then he got scammed in a Borrower’s Defense and I’m just like,

Andrew Ross: You know, that’s the landscape of debt. There’s, there’s, there’s so many scams. There are so many con men, there’s so many grifters and bottom feeders in this business. It’s, it’s very easy to fall prey and they, and they’re always looking for their mark.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. And you said, in one of your previous interviews about how, or even maybe it was in the book, how lucrative student debt is, and that is why it’s so hard to buy it on the secondary market, because like people don’t offload student debt. I think in 2013, when you had written the book, you had said that, they made 36 cents per dollar off of student debt.

And it’s like one of the most lucrative types of debt that is out there, which is awful, so awful.

Andrew Ross: One of the main reasons for that, and you can’t discharge it through bankruptcy. Student debt’s one of the very few debt class is that you can’t, you can’t declare bankruptcy around. So that’s going to make it lucrative and an of itself, but the power, the power to garnish the power to garnish student debt is also a very strong. And, and I think also, it’s, more psychological. I think, I think people, even though 1 million student debtors they’ll do default on average every year. There’s still is this very strong mentality that, around student debt that, you know, I got my education or maybe I didn’t graduate, but I still got an education and I’m, I really, I have to pay this back.

It’s a very powerful mentality, which we’ve been trying to erode.

Nikki Nolan: You talked about, the debt trap and I feel like some people don’t know what the debt trap is. Could you explain what sort of like the debt trap is and debtors’ prison?

Andrew Ross: The debt trap was, I guess it was an, it was a name, it was a phrase that really came up in the context of, the debt burdens accumulated by global South countries in the 1970s and 1980s. You know, these are post-colonial countries for the most part that were trying to steer an independent path.

And for one reason or another, they took on external loans. From Northern countries or Northern banks. And, and they got themselves into a hole, unable to pay back these loans. And, they entered their multilateral lending institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank stepped in and said, you know, okay, we’ll, we’ll help you.

We’ll help you out of your debt trap. Because from a political perspective, it was a trap that was laid for these post-colonial countries that their economic independence was being thwarted by taking on such large amounts of debt, they were no longer in a position to exercise their independence. IMF and the World Bank to say, here’s the way out of the debt trap.

We’ll give you additional loans, but you have to promise to first of all, pay back your existing debts with the loans and also promise to, to cut back on your public programs, the, the public employee payrolls and also your social programs. So it was basically a way of, it was called structural adjustment, and it was basically a paradigm that, that steers a lot of these countries away from a more independent non-aligned political path in the world, or, or, I mean, some of them were veering towards adopting, you know, socialist principles. For the Northern banks and Northern countries this was a way of pulling them back in line. And the debt trap was a very efficient mechanism for, you know, depriving them of their independence. We saw the debt trap migrate to the global North after the financial crisis in 2008. And a lot of countries in Europe were also, in the same position and a lot of debtors in countries like this find themselves in, in, in a debt trap.

So I think for, for folks in first world countries like this, they, they tended to look at credit as, a debt as good credit as opposed to bad credit. And that changed, I think after 2008, when, when debt, the burden of debt, was really revealed to be, something that was more widely distributed and much more of a problem approaching a crisis type, type of problem for, you know, large sectors of the population.

Debtor’s prison is something that was, was supposed to have been abolished in the US in, the 1840s. The practice of, you know, being in prison, cause you can’t pay your debts. It’s technically speaking, that can’t happen anymore, but there are all sorts of ways in which you can actually end up in jail or prison, through that failure to show up, for a court appearance.

For example, if you have, you know, traffic fines and you failed to show, you can be held in contempt of court and you can serve jail time in a lot of states for that and jail time can lead to a longer sentence and imprisonment incarceration. So, technically speaking, you’re not being incarcerated because you didn’t pay your debts, but it’s tantamount the same thing.

And so people do speak about that as a revival, through the back door, of debtor’s prisons in this country.

Nikki Nolan: What is a revolver?

Andrew Ross: I explain it is, my book, my book is called Creditocracy and the creditocracy is a kind of society where, everyone’s very deeply in debt and there’s no way they can pay off these debts.

And, someone might reasonably say, well, what’s in it for the creditor? Why, why would that be a good thing for the creditor class? When, when a population is so deeply indebted, they will never be able to pay back their debts? That doesn’t make sense. And that’s the wrong question in my view, because creditors don’t want you to pay back your debts entirely.

Take the credit cards. If you pay, if you pay your balance at the end of the month on your credit card, you’re getting your credit for free. That’s not what they want you to do. They don’t want you to pay your balance. In fact, in the industry, the, the, the name for you if you do that, deadbeat, you’re called the deadbeat because you’re not generating any profit for the credit card issuer.

They want you to be in a position where you can’t pay that balance, where you roll over the debt, you pay the penalties, you pay the merchant fees, you pay the late fees, you’re generating income, but the principle is being rolled over and, and the technical term for that is revolving debt and you’re a revolver and, that’s the ideal citizen and in credit in a creditocracy, someone, someone who’s a revolver. And that the goal of an creditocracy for the creditor class is to make lifelong revolvers of all of us. We never pay off our debts entirely because if we did, we’d no longer be generating profit. As long as we’re debtors, there are ways of extracting squeezing income from us.

And so that’s the goal to make revolvers of us all until the day we die. This is lifelong. Lifelong financial extraction is, is the basic principle now of 21st century capitalism in many ways.

Nikki Nolan: You’re one of the co-founders of the Debt Collective, which is, creating a debtors’ union. Do you want to talk a little bit more about them and like what’s been going on?

Andrew Ross: Yeah, this is a long held, aspiration of ours to create a debtors’ union. I mean, we’ve, we’ve argued even before the Debt Collective that that debtors’ unions are not only needed, they’re inevitable in some way. And there was a point in industrial capitalism when labor unions were necessary and inevitable.

And, we feel that given, given the shift towards financial capitalism, that, that debtors’ unions are an appropriate format for collective action. That’s not to say that, you know, labor unions are no longer necessary. Wage conflict is still, still very, very important. And we need organizations that are able to fight that, on that terrain.

But, we also need something else and that’s where the debtors’ union comes in. And I I’ve always maintained that, you know, debtors’ unions are extension of a labor movement, because when you know, when you sign a loan, when you sign for a loan, you’re basically promising your future wages, in advance.

And, the other way of thinking about this is to think about that as a form of wage theft, premature wage stuff. There’s so there’s, there’s lots of approaches to, to the topic that puts you firmly in the camp of, of labor it’s impossible to avoid that. So, that said, debtors’ union is not quite like a labor union, not quite like a trade union, it’s for, it is much more difficult to organize debtors. Not easy to organize workers and workplace, especially in the US, but it’s much more difficult because, debtors tend not to know each other as workers who share a common workplace do and they knowing each other, it’s easier to establish trust, relationships of trust and eventually solidarity.

How you organize among debtors is it’s just so much more difficult. More often than not, you don’t know who actually holds your debt. you know, credit creditors will, sell your debt on. And so it’s not guaranteed there will be a common creditor to organize around, which you know, which, which makes, which would make sense.

But that’s not always the case. So it’s tough. I mean, we’ve discovered how tough it is. Nonetheless, the Debt Collective was, was developed as a, as a way of launching a debtors’ union. And, we do, you know, we have several thousand members who do pay dues the way you would pay to a you know, union, there are services available.

We have paid staff and the Debt Collective now, paid organizers. And, and there is a platform, a fairly sophisticated platform that has been technically worked out that allow, allow members to communicate with each other and build relationships. And, now we’re forming, local branches in various cities of about a dozen cities where we have branches.

So the members can, can meet each other and an organize together, which is important for a union. But overall, the principle really is that, you know, collective action can produce results and we have proof of concept in the rolling jubilee and also in the Corinthian debt strike. Couple of billion dollars at this point to prove, a couple of billion dollars of debt abolition to prove that collective action gets results.

That’s, you know, that’s, that’s the basic principle. You can always renegotiate your debts on an individual basis with your creditors the door is always open to do that as you know. But doing it collectively is a whole other matter. It gives you so much more power, at the negotiating table than if you do it individually is same at all levels of debt.

Even for sovereign countries, you can go. If you’re a global South, debtor country, you can go to the Club of Paris, which is the, you know, the clearinghouse for the Northern creditors. And you can grovel in front of the Club of Paris and, you know, beg to have your debt restructured on an individual basis.

You can’t do it with more than, you know, one debtor, countries can’t go in collectively. So that, you know, that’s a fundamental principle and that’s what makes a that’s what makes it, make sense to talk about a union. So that’s our long-term goal.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, and you have the Biden Jubilee 100 going on, correct? Right now, is like one of your campaigns?

Andrew Ross: Yeah, there is debt strike ongoing. I mean, it’s a little, we’re a little past a hundred days at this point, but, the pressure, I think it has, the campaign really has helped to put pressure on, on, on the President. He knows, and, and his legal advisors know that he has the, he does have the authority to cancel student debt without, without Congress, without any need for a Congressional act.

And, you know, we’re hoping to see some of that fairly soon.

Nikki Nolan: It needs to be all of it. Like it it’s so ridiculous. Like, you know, we’ve been through this, like over a year of the pause of, student loans being paused, the government hasn’t collapsed and there was a new statistic that was just released that the government has saved $90 billion not servicing the loans.

I, I, I fundamentally do not understand the opposition. I mean, I understand it because you keep people as revolvers. That’s the baseline, right? Like you just keep people as a revolving piggy bank that you can like source money from. But like, if it will cost less to cancel it all than it would count to cancel like a, not like a different amount.

Like I just, can you help me? I mean, this isn’t a question I’m just like, so confused about like, what is the opposition? Why is this so hard? Like if the numbers all, add up that it’s better to do College for All? Like fundamentally, like it costs, it’s like more cost-effective to just provide free college.

And it costs less for the government to not have to service these loans. Why aren’t we doing it?

Andrew Ross: No, that’s a good question. There, there is, there is a resistance, although universal programs are universally popular. I mean, look at it. Social security, K through 12, Medicare, these are universally popular programs. Everyone loves them. They’re not going away every so often there’s an effort, you know, to jeopardize social security or, you know, divert it into Wall Street.

But, the, but I think the lesson from these programs is that once they’re there, they’re there to stay. And you can’t chip away at them. And erode them and in times of austerity cut them back. And some of the resistance within government to universal programs is precisely around that they want that kind of flexibility to scale back programs.

And that’s why there’s such an appetite for means-testing and for partial discharge. The College for All legislation that is currently there was introduced by Bernie Sanders is means-tested now is for families who have a less than $125,000 of income, his previous bills were not means-tested. They were, they were fully universal and, you know, it’s, it’s now means-tested, done in the name of political pragmatism.

It’s, it’s unfortunate. We feel it’s the wrong thing to do, because we, we do believe that the, the universal programs are the most popular. And, but that’s, you know, that’s just the nature of American politics. So it’s just a big struggle to get to the universal. And even the most liberal politicians prefer means-testing.

They think it’s fundamentally more fair in some way. We disagree and, the economic data, supports that disagreement.

Nikki Nolan: So how do we win? Collective action?

Andrew Ross: You can take the long view and we’ve been in this fight for long enough that we can take the long view. And when we first started pushing for College for All, and, and that jubilee in 2011, it was, it was such a marginal idea. It was so far outside of the Overton window for what’s considered, you know, politically acceptable and in the mainstream, very marginal ideas from far left, far left field and in the course of a what, 10 years.

Okay. Yeah, we have seen these ideas really move quite rapidly to the, to the center of, of mainstream debate. I mean, they were primary primetime talking points in the last presidential campaigns and, they continued to be, you know, they continue to occupy, the mainstream. So that shift from, from the margin to the mainstream happened over the course of 10 years, which is quite phenomenal if you think about that and, where do we go from here? It’s a big question.

Nikki Nolan: Is there anything that you want to promote as we are wrapping up, we’re coming to the end.

Andrew Ross: For your audience or listeners, really, I would just encourage people to get, to get involved. I mean, there there’s, a lot of, there are a lot of student debtors are very concerned and frustrated and angry and depressed and divorced, and a lot of suicides that result from student debt burden.

We’ve heard stories like this. From multiple sources over the years, getting out and getting, getting active and being part of an organized effort, like the Debt Collective can help, it’s good therapy, which is not, which is not unimportant. You can, you can channel your, your rage into, you know, constructive organizing and when we need you, we need the numbers quite frankly, to put this thing over the top.

So the, yeah, there, there, there is a solution. There’s no guarantee that that organizing is going to produce results, but our track record shows so far that it can and will, we just, we just need the numbers of this point and, and, and the additional energy from, from organizers. So you can do something about it. Each of you come and join us.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here today and talking with me.

Andrew Ross: Pleasure. pleasure. Thank you, Nikki.

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