The Rolling Jubilee campaign is raising money to buy up cheap debt and forgive it.
I wrote to them asking
1) Who will sell you debt for pennies on the dollar?
2) Who's debt will you buy?
3) Don't you think the price will go up if the campaign gets traction?
4) is there a way that we can buy the debt of people we care about?
5) By purchasing the debt, you legitimise it, and the whole system that created it.
Why not a campaign of solidarity and support for debtors and people who default?
I believe mass defaults may be a more effective way to effect meaningful change.
BREAKING NEWS: a mirror project is launching in UK
www.m1llionbailout.blogspot.com
Comments1
Member for
16 years 1 month[Answer from rolling jubilee]
[Answer from rolling jubilee] Thanks for getting in touch.
1) We're buying debt from sellers on the secondary debt market. We can't disclose the identity of our industry contacts.
2) We're only buying medical debts. The debts are bundled together anonymously, so we don't know the people's information until after we buy the debts.
3) At the scale we currently operate, we are big enough to help thousands of people, but we are not big enough to materially affect the entire system. The market for secondary debt is tens of billions a year, possibly even over a hundred billion. Right now, we're only spending hundreds of thousands, so we'd need to grow by a factor of a thousand or more before we really started being a significant force in the debt market. Right now, we're making a statement, shining a light, and helping people who are on the front lines of a battle that we are all fighting.
4) Debt buying is a complicated process that requires a complex organizational and legal structure. It took Rolling Jubilee a long time and many committed volunteers to get to the point where we can purchase debt and abolish it. In addition, looking for one person’s debt is like looking for a needle in a haystack. For that reason, it is not possible to buy any specific individual’s debt.
5) We purchase our debt from debt buyers who are already buying very large amounts of debt. If we don't buy this debt, it will likely go to debt collectors. So we are actually literally taking money *out* of the system, because debt collectors would likely extract money from the debtors. Instead, we abolish the debt, and leave the money where it belongs: with the people who earned it.
Rolling Jubilee is only one tactic in a larger arsenal of debt resistance techniques. You can check out strikedebt.org for more information. We wrote a Debt Resistors Operations Manual, an organizing kit to help individuals in their communities, and are working on more projects to call attention to and resist the predatory debt system in this country. But we consider Rolling Jubilee to be successful because it both helped people directly and opened up a much larger conversation about debt, and that's a great first step.