Buying Debt Is a Real Thing, and These Guys Are Doing It for Good Melissa Rayworth - TakePart
go to original April 19, 2014

What is the Rolling Jubilee? (StrikeDebt)

Cassie Thornton was raised by a single mom who used credit cards to keep the monthly bills paid. She remembers the fear that there might not be enough money for the basics and the realization that their debt was only growing. And she remembers the shame of foreclosure when they lost their home.

Now a 32-year-old artist in the Bay Area, Thornton has her own little mountain of college debt, but she is working to free others of debt as an organizer for an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement called Strike Debt.

In an initiative dubbed The Rolling Jubilee, Strike Debt uses donations to blindly buy up outstanding debts from creditors, pennies on the dollar. Then, instead of trying to collect on the debt, it notifies the person who owes money that the debt has been absolved.

Since it was founded in May 2012, the group has paid off more than $15 million in medical debt by raising more than $700,000 in donations.

Read the rest at TakePart

Written by a network of activists, writers, and academics, The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual reveals how the predatory debt system works to increase inequality, undermine democracy, and ruin lives. It provides detailed strategies for fighting common forms of debt and lays out an expansive vision for a societal movement of debt resistance. The full text of the manual is available for free.

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