Strike_Debt

That is true, we are kicking this off by buying medical debt. We've already abolished a 100,000 dollars of medical debt it only cost us 5,000.

We are going to contact them by certified mail. We take debtors' privacy very seriously. There is a lot of shame around debt. We want to remove that shame. Showing up a la Publisher's Clearinghouse style is probably not the best way to do that.

On the issue of debt and shame, we highly recommend our friend Chris Kasper's beautiful essay in Yes!.

This has been an idea floating around activist circles for several years now, but it took a lot of people working together to make it actually happen. We want to shine a spotlight on various injustices within our debt economy. We're starting with medical debt, but will be targeting other injustices too. There are so many injustices out there.

We are not lawyers, although we do have lawyers advising us, please read this article, it explains it better than we can:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/11/10/links-10-nov-finally-an-occupy-wall-street-idea-we-can-all-get-behind-the-rolling-jubilee/

A functional bankruptcy process IS a kind of jubilee. The problem is that our bankruptcy laws have been rewritten to screw the 99%.

If I could pick just one law to be the "poster child" for the critique that Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street have of our corrupt system it would be the 2005 Orwellian named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This was a bill that would never in a million years get passed if our "representatives" actually represented us. This was a bill that was literally bad for 99.999999999999% of Americans. It was written by a lobbyist for the credit card industry and the only people it benefited were the banks and the credit card companies. That's it. It rewrote the laws to make it harder to file for bankruptcy and harder to get your debt discharged, even if you had a good reason to do so (got sick, lost job, got hit by hurricane Sandy, took a risk in your business and it didn't work out, etc). Without bankruptcy protection the banks can continue to bleed people of their hard earned income. Again, if we had anything resembling a democracy where representatives actually represent the interest of their constituants then a bill like this would be dead in the water. Yet it passed. That should tell us something.

Meanwhile the rules are different for the 1%. Seriously, just read this article about the way American Airlines went through a strategic bankruptcy earlier this year.

Even though American Airlines had over $4 billion dollars in the bank account, even though they paid their executives multi-million dollar salaries, even though they could pay all their debts and bills and paychecks for the foreseeable future, the investors in American Airlines decided that they could make more money if they just walked away from their obligations. They filed for bankruptcy ($4 billion doesn't sound bankrupt to me) and got their debts wiped out. Once they filed for bankruptcy they were able to break the promises they made to their workers in the contract they entered into. They just tore that contract up, turned around and laid off workers and cut the pay of others. Now THAT'S bankruptcy abuse.

tl;dr: we need a jubilee because for all intents and purposes we do not have a bankruptcy law that is designed to help the 99%