Occupy Wall Street has been buying up cheap debts and forgiven them:
By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.
“We thought that the ratio would be about 20 to 1,” said Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. He said the team initially envisaged raising $50,000, which would have enabled it to buy $1m in debt.
“In fact we’ve been able to buy debt a lot more cheaply than that.”
While the cancelling of debt was one goal of this Rolling Jubilee project, the real goal was education:
“Our purpose in doing this, aside from helping some people along the way – there’s certainly many, many people who are very thankful that their debts are abolished – our primary purpose was to spread information about the workings of this secondary debt market.”
Many people think of a debt something as sacrosanct, something they have to pay off in their entirety, not something that can be negotiated. Just knowing that it can be, can empower a lot of people to do so.
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